Feature Request: I Already Know That Part, Siri

I live pretty close to a major interstate highway. If you stand in the right place in my backyard, you can see the trucks! But, thanks to the turn-of-the-century suburb I live in, it’s at least 5 “turns” to get from my house to the freeway. I also live in one of those cities that’s a major freeway confluence, which means I’m another 2 or 3 “turns” away from at least 5 different numbered freeways?

So of course, when I need directions from Apple Maps (or any other nav system,) Siri very patiently explains how to get from my house to the freeway, which, yes Siri, I know that part.

I wish there was a way to mark an area on the the map as “look, I grew up here, I got this.” I wish, when I’m driving out to the mountains or whatever, Siri would start with “Get on I-5 south, I’ll be back with you in half an hour.” I want to be able to tell it “no, look, I know all these turns, I just want you to tell me when we’re at the destination so I don’t drive past the weird driveway again.” That’s an Apple Intelligence feature I’d be impressed by.

Apple vs Games

Apple Arcade is in the news again, for not great reasons; as always, Tsai has the roundup, the but the short, short version is that Arcade is going exactly as well as all of Apple’s other video game–related efforts have gone for the last “since forever.”

My first take was that games might be the most notable place Apple’s “one guy at the top” structure falls down. Apple’s greatest strength and greatest weakness has always been that the whole company is laser focused on whatever the guy in charge cares about, and not much of anything else. Currently, that means that Apple’s priorities are, in no particular order, privacy, health, thin devices, operational efficiency, and, I guess, becoming “the new HBO.” Games aren’t anywhere near that list, and never have been. I understand the desire to keep everything flowing through one central point, and not to have siloed-off business units or what have you. On the other hand Bill Gates wasn’t a gamer either, but he knew to hire someone to be in charge of X-everything and leave them alone.

But then I remembered AppleTV+. Somehow, in a very short amount of time, Apple figured out how to be a production company, and made Ted Lasso, a new Fraggle Rock, some new Peanuts, and knocked out a Werner Herzog documentary for good measure. I refuse to believe that happened because Tim Apple was signing off on every production decision or script; they found the right people and enabled them correctly.

At this point, there’s just no excuse why AppleTV has something like Ted Lasso, and Apple Arcade doesn’t. There’s obvious questions like “why did I play Untitled Goose Game on my Switch instead of my Mac” and “why did they blow acquiring Bungie twice”. Why isn’t the Mac the premier game platform? Why? What’s the malfunction?

Sauce, for the Goose

There’s a lot of interesting things to talk about with the current resurgence of regulators squaring off with “Big Tech”. The most spicy one currently is the EU’s DMA law telling Apple that they have to allow alternate app stores and the like, and Apple trying their best not to hear that.

Anyway, I see today that there’s a whole host of new iOS features that Apple has announced that they will not be shipping to customers in Europe due to “regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act.”

As someone who once worked on a project that got shelved, in part, because the company I was working for wasn’t willing to accept the risk of doing all this work and then having Apple tell us it was a no go, my reaction is: “lol; lmao, even.”

I cannot tell you how profoundly satisfying it is to watch one of the largest companies in the world squirm and whine because they’re finally getting the same treatment they’ve been giving everyone else this entire time.

Nature is healing.

And Another Thing: Pianos

I thought I had said everything I had to say about that Crush ad, but… I keep thinking about the Piano.

One of the items crushed by the hydraulic press into the new iPad was an upright piano. A pretty nice looking one! There was some speculation at first about how much of that ad was “real” vs CG, but the apology didn’t include Apple reassuring everyone that it wasn’t a real piano, I have to assume they really did sacrifice a perfectly good upright piano for a commercial. Which is sad, and stupid expensive, but not the point.

I grew up in a house with, and I swear I am not making this up, two pianos. One was an upright not unlike the one in the ad—that piano has since found a new home, and lives at my uncle’s house now. The other piano is a gorgeous baby grand. It’s been the centerpiece of my parent’s living room for forty-plus years now. It was the piano in my mom’s house when she was a little girl, and I think it belonged to her grandparents before that. If I’m doing my math right, it’s pushing 80 or so years old. It hasn’t been tuned since the mid-90s, but it still sounds great. The pedals are getting a little soft, there’s some “battle damage” here and there, but it’s still incredible. It’s getting old, but barring any looney tunes–style accidents, it’ll still be helping toddlers learn chopsticks in another 80 years.

My point is: This piano is beloved. My cousins would come over just so they could play it. We’ve got pictures of basically every family member for four generations sitting at, on, or around it. Everyone has played it. It’s currently covered in framed pictures of the family, in some cases with pictures of little kids next to pictures of their parents at the same age. When estate planning comes up, as it does from time to time, this piano gets as much discussion as just about everything else combined. I am, by several orders of magnatude, the least musically adept member of my entire extended family, and even I love this thing. It’s not a family heirloom so much as a family member.

And, are some ad execs in Cupertino really suggesting I replace all that with… an iPad?

I made the point about how fast Apple obsoletes things last time, so you know what? Let’s spot them that, and while we’re at it, let’s spot them how long we know that battery will keep working. Hell, let’s even spot them the “playing notes that sound like a piano” part of being a piano, just to be generous.

Are they seriously suggesting that I can set my 2-year old down on top of the iPad to take the camera from my dad to take a picture while my mom shows my 4-year old how to play chords? That we’re all going to stand in front of the iPad to get a group shot at thanksgiving? That the framed photos of the wedding are going to sit on top of the iPad? That the iPad is going to be something there will be tense negotiations about who inherits?

No, of course not.

What made that ad so infuriating was that they weren’t suggesting any such thing, because it never occurred to them. They just thought they were making a cute ad, but instead they (accidentally?) perfectly captured the zeitgeist.

One of the many reasons why people are fed up with “big tech” is that as “software eats the world” and tries to replace everything, it doesn’t actually replace everything. It just replaces the top line thing, the thing in the middle, the thing thats easy. And then abandons everything else that surrounds it. And it’s that other stuff, the people crowded around the piano, the photos, that really actually matters. You know, culture. Which is how you end up with this “stripping the copper out of the walls” quality the world has right now; it’s a world being rebuilt by people whose lives are so empty they think the only thing a piano does is play notes.

Crushed

What’s it look like when a company just runs out of good will?

I am, of course, talking about that ad Apple made and then apologized for where the hydraulic press smashes things down and reveals—the new iPad!

The Crush ad feels like a kind of inflection point. Because a few years ago, this would have gone over fine. Maybe a few grumps would have grouched about it, but you can imagine most people would have taken it in good humor, there would have been a lot of tweets on the theme of “look, what they meant was…”

Ahhh, that’s not how this one went? It’s easy to understand why some folks felt so angry; my initial response was more along the lines of “yeaaah, read the room.”

As more than one person pointed out, Apple’s far from the first company to use this metaphor to talk about a new smaller product; Nintendo back in the 90s, Nokia in ’08. And, look, first of all, “Nokia did it” isn’t the quality of defense you think it is, and second, I don’t know guys, maybe some stuff has happened over the last fifteen years to change the relationship artists have with big tech companies?

Apple has built up a lot of good will over the last couple of decades, mostly by making nice stuff that worked for regular people, without being obviously an ad or a scam, some kind of corporate nightmare, or a set of unserious tinkertoys that still doesn’t play sound right.

They’ve been withdrawing from that account quite a lot the last decade: weird changes, the entire app store “situation”, the focus on subscriptions and “services”. Squandering 20 years of built-up good will on “not fixing the keyboards.” And you couple that with the state of the whole tech industry: everyone knows Google doesn’t work as well as it used to, email is all spam, you can’t answer the phone anymore because a robot is going to try and rip you off, how many scam text messages thye get, Amazon is full of bootleg junk, etsy isn’t hand-made anymore, social media is all bots and fascists, most things that made tech fun or exciting a decade or more ago has rotted out. And then, as every other tech company falls over themselves to gut the entirety of the arts and humanities to feed them into their Plagiarism Machines so techbros don’t have to pay artists, Apple—the “intersection of technology and liberal arts”—goes and does this? Et tu?

I picture last week as the moment Apple looked down and realized, Wile E Coyote style, they they were standing out in mid-air having walked off the edge of their accumulated good will.

On the one hand, no, that’s not what they meant, it was misinterpreted. But on the other hand—yes, maybe it really was what they meant, the people making just hadn’t realized the degree to which they were saying the quiet part out loud.

Because a company smashing beautiful tools that have worked for decades to reveal a device that’ll stop being eligible for software updates in a few years is the perfect metaphor for the current moment.

Antiderivitives

I’ve been thinking all week about this macbook air review by Paul Thurrott: Apple MacBook Air 15-Inch M3 Review - Thurrott.com (via Daring Fireball).

For a little bit of context Thurrott has spend most of the last couple decades as The Windows Guy. I haven’t really kept up on the folks in the Windows ecosystem now that I’m not in that ecosystem as much anymore, so it’s wild to see him give a glowing review to the macbook.

It’s a great review, and his observations really mirrored mine when I made the switch fifteen years or so ago (“you mean, I can just close the lid, and that works?”). And it’s interesting to see what the Macbook looks like from someone who still has a Windows accent. But that’s not what I keep thinking about. What I keep thinking about is this little aside in the middle:

From a preload perspective, the MacBook Air is bogged down with far too many Apple apps, just as iPhones and iPads are. And I’m curious that Apple doesn’t get dinged on this, though you can, at least, remove what you don’t want, and some of the apps are truly useful. Sonoma includes over 30 (!) apps, and while none are literally crapware, many are gratuitous and unnecessary. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning that up, but it was a one-time job. And new users should at least examine what’s there. Some of these apps—Safari, Pages, iMovie, and others—are truly excellent and may surprise you. Obviously, I also installed a lot of the third-party apps I need.

And this is just the perfect summary of the difference in Operating System Philosophy between Redmond and Cupertino.

Microsoft has always taken the world-view that the OS exists to provide a platform for other people to sell you things. A new PC with just the Microsoft OS of the day, DOS, Windows 3, Win 95 Windows 11, whichever, is basically worthless. That machine won’t do anything for you that you want to do, you have to go buy more software from what Microsoft calls an “Independent software vendor” or from them, but they’re not gonna throw Word in for free, that’s crazy. PCs are a platform to make money.

Apple, on the other hand, thinks of computers as appliances. You buy a computing device from Apple, a Mac, iPhone, whatever, out of the box that’ll do nearly everything you need it to do. All the core needs are met, and then some. Are those apps best-in-class? In some cases, yes, but mostly if you need something better you’re probably a professional and already know that. They’re all-in-one appliances, and 3rd party apps are bonus value, but not required.

And I think this really strikes to the heart of a lot of the various anti-monopoly regulatory cases swirling around Apple, and Google, and others. Not all, but a whole lot of them boil down to basically, “Is Integration Bad?” Because one of the core principles of the last several decades of tech product design has been essentially “actually, it would be boss if movie studios owned their own theatres”.

And there’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but also? Kinda not. We’ve been doing this experiment around tightly integrated product design for the last couple of decades, and how do “we” (for certain values of “we”) feel about it?

I don’t have a strong conclusion here, so this feels like one of those posts where I end by either linking to Libya is a land of contrasts or the dril tweet about drunk driving..

But I think there’s an interesting realignment happening, and you can smell the winds shifting around whats kinds of tradeoffs people are willing to accept. So maybe I’ll just link to this instead?

Apple Report Card, Early 2024

So, lets take a peek behind the ol’ curtain here at icecano dot com. I’ve got a drafts folder on my laptop—which for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment—is named “on deck”, and when I come across something that might be a blog post but isn’t yet, I make a new file and toss it in. Stray observations, links, partially-constructed jokes, whatever. A couple lifetimes back, these probably would have just been tweets? Instead, I kind of let them simmer in the background until I have something to do with them. For example, this spent two months as a text file containing the only the phrase “that deranged rolling stone list”. I have a soft rule that after about three months they get moved to another folder named “never mind.”

And so, over the last couple of months that drafts pile had picked up a fair number of stray Apple-related observations. There’s been a lot going on! Lawsuits, the EU, chat protocols, shenanigans galore. So I kept noting down bits and bobs, but no coherent takes or anything. There was no structure. Then, back in February, Six Colors published their annual “Apple Report Card”.

Every year for the last decade or so, SixColors has done an “Apple Report Card”, where they poll a panel on a variety of Apple-related topics and get a sense of how the company is doing, or at least perceived as doing. This year was: Apple in 2023: The Six Colors report card . There are a series of categories, where the panel grades the company on an A-F scale, and adds commentary as desired.

The categories are a little funny, because they make a lot of sense for a decade ago but aren’t quite what I’d make them in 2024, but having longitudinal data is more interesting than revising the buckets. And it’s genuinely interesting to see how the aggregate scores have changed over the years.

And, so, I think, aha, there’s the structure, I can wedge all these japes into that shape, have a little fun with it. Alert readers will note this was about when I hurt my back, so wasn’t in shape to sit down a write a longer piece for a while there, so the lashed-together draft kinda floated along. Finally, this week, I said to myself, I said, look, just wrap that sucker up and post it, it’s not like there’s gonna be any big Apple news this week!

Let me take a big sip of coffee and check the news, and then let’s go ahead and add a category up front so we can talk about the antitrust lawsuit, I guess?

The Antitrust Lawsuit, I Guess: F

This has been clearly coming for a while, as the antitrust and regulatory apparatus continues to slowly awaken from its long slumber.

At first glance, I have a very similar reaction to this as I had to the Microsoft Antritrust thing back in the 90s, in that:

1. This action is long overdue
2. The company in question should have seen this coming and easily dodged, but instead they’re sucking claw to the face
3. The DOJ has their attention pointed all the wrong things, and then the legal action is either gonna ricochet off or cause more harm than good. They actually mention the bubble colors in the filing, for chrissakes. Mostly they seem determined to go after the things people actually like about Apple’s gear?

But this is all so much dumber than last time, mostly because Microsoft wasn’t living in a world where the Microsoft lawsuit had already happened. This was so, so avoidable; a little performative rule changes, cut some prices, form a few industry working groups, maybe start a Comics Code Authority, whatever. Instead, Apple’s entire response to the whole situation has been somewhere between a little kid refusing to leave the toy store mixed with an old guy yelling “it’s better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!” at the Arby’s drive through. I’m not sure I can think of another example where a company blew their own legs off because deep down they really don’t believe that regulators are real. That said, the entire post-dot-com Big Tech world only exists because the entire regulatory system has been hibernating out of sight. Well, it’s roused now, baby.

You know the part at the start of that Mork Movie where The Martian keeps getting into streetfights, but then keeps getting himself out of trouble because he knows some obscure legal technicality, but then the judge that looks exactly like Kurt Vonnegut says something like “I don’t care, you hit a cop and you’re going down,” so that the rest of the movie can happen? I think Apple is about to learn some cool life lessons as a janitor, is what I’m saying.

I may have let that metaphor get away from me. Let’s move on, I’m sure there aren’t any other sections here where the recent news will cause me to have to revise from future-tense to past-tense!

Mac: A-

Honestly, as a product line, the mac is probably as coherent and healthy as it’s ever been. Now that they’re fully moved over to their own processors and no longer making “really nice Intel computers”, we’re starting to see some real action.

A line of computers where they all have the same “guts” and the form factor is an aesthetic & functional choice, but not a performance one, is something no one’s ever done before? It seems like they’re on the verge of getting into an annual or annual-and-a-half regular upgrade cycle like the iOS devices have, and that’ll really be a thing when it lands.

Well, all except The Mac Pro, which still feels like a placeholder?

Are they expensive? Yes they are. Pound-for-pound, they’re not as expensive as they seem, because they don’t make anything on the lower-end of the spectrum, and so a lot of complaints about price have the same tenor as complaining that BMWs cost more than an entry-level Toyota Camry, where you just go “yeah, man, they absolutely do.” Then I go look at what it costs to upgrade to a usable amount of RAM and throw my hands up in disgust. How is that not the lead on the DOJ action? They want HOW much to get up to 16 gigs of RAM?

MacOS as a platform is evolving well beyond “BSD, but with a nice UI” the way it was back when it was named OS X. I’m not personally crazy about a lot of the design moves, but I’d be hard pressed to call most of them “objectively bad”, as opposed to “not to my taste”. Except for that new settings panel, that’s garbage.

All that said… actually, I’m going to finish this sentence down under “SW Quality”. I’ll meet ya down there.

iPhone: 🔥

On the one hand, the iPhone might be the most polished and refined tech product of all time. Somewhere around the iPhone 4 or 5, it was “done”; all major features were there, the form factor was locked in. And Apple kept refining, polishing. These supercomputers-in-slabs-of-glass are really remarkable.

On the other hand, that’t not what anyone means when they talk about the iPhone in 2024. Yeah, let’s talk about the App Store.

I had a whole thing here about the app store was clearly the thing that was going to summon the regulators, which I took out partly because it was superfluous now, but also because apparently it was actually the bubble colors?

There’s a lot of takes on the nature of software distribution, and what kind of device the phone is, and how the ecosystem around it should work, and “what Apple customers want.” Well, okay, I’m an Apple user. Mostly a fairly satisfied one. And you know what I want? I want the app store they fucking advertise.

Instead, I had to keep having conversations with my kids about “trick games”, and explain that no, the thing called “the Oregon trail” in the app store isn’t the game they’ve heard about, but is actually a fucking casino. I like Apple’s kit quite a bit, and I keep buying it, but never in a million years will I forgive Tim Apple for the conversations I had to keep having with them about one fucking scam app after another.

Because this is what drives me the most crazy in all the hoopla around the app stores: if it worked like they claim it works, none of this would be happening. Instead, we have bizarre and inconsistant app review, apps getting pulled after being accepted, openly predatory in-app purchases, and just scam after casino after should-be-illegal-knock-off-clone after scam.

The idea is great: Phones for people who don’t use computers as a source of self-actualization. Phones and Macs are different products, with a different deal. Part of the deal is that with the iPhone you can do “less”, but what you can do is rock solid, safe, and you don’t ever have to worry about what your mom or your kid might download on their device.

I know the deal, I signed up for that deal on purpose! I want them to hold up their side of the bargain.

Which brings me to my next point. One of the metaphors people use for iOS devices—which I think is a good one!—is that they’re more like game consoles than general purpose computers. They’re “app consoles”. And I like that, that’s a solid way of looking at the space. It’s Jobs’ “cars vs trucks” metaphor but with a slightly less-leaky abstraction.

But you know who doesn’t have these legal and developer relations problems, and who isn’t currently having their ass handed to them by the EU and the DOJ? Nintendo.

This is what kills me. You can absolutely sell a computer where every piece of software is approved by you, where you get a cut, where the store isn’t choked by garbage, where everyone is basically happy. Nintendo has been doing that for checks notes 40 years now?

Hell, Nintendo even kept the bottom from falling out of the prices by enforcing that while you could sell for any price, you had to sell the physical and digital copies at the same amount, and then left all their stuff at 60-70 bucks, giving air cover to the small guys to charge a sustainable price.

Apple and Nintendo are very similar companies, building their own hardware and software, at a slightly different angle from the rest of their industries. They both have a solid “us first, customers second, devs third” world-view. But Nintendo has maintained a level of control over their platform that Apple could only dream of. And I’m really oversimplifying here, but mostly they did this by just not being assholes? Nintendo is not a perfect company, because none of them are, but you know what? I can play Untitled Goose Game on my Switch.

In the end, Apple was so averse to games, they couldn’t even bring themselves to use Nintendo’s playbook to keep the Feds off their back.

iPad: C

I’m utterly convinced that somewhere around 1979 Steve Jobs had a vision—possibly chemically assisted—of The Computer. A device that was easy to use, fully self-contained, an appliance, not a specialist’s tool. Something kids could pick up and use.

Go dial up his keynote where he introduces the first iPad. He knows he’s dying, even if he wasn’t admitting it, and he knows this is the last “new thing” he’s going to present. The look on his face is satisfaction: he made it. The thing he saw in the desert all those years ago, he’s holding it in his hands on stage. Finally.

So, ahhhh, why isn’t it actually good for anything?

I take that back; it’s good for two things: watching video, and casual video games. Anything else… not really?

I’m continually baffled by the way the iPad just didn’t happen. It’s been fourteen years; fourteen years after the first Mac, the Mac Classic was basically over, all the stuff the Mac opened up was well in the past-tense. I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that happened because the iPad existed. Maybe in a world with small laptops and big-ass phones, the iPad just doesn’t have a seat at the big-kids table?

Watch & Wearables: C

I like my watch enough that when my old one died, I bought a new one, but not so much that I didn’t have to really, really think about it.

Airpods are pretty cool, except they make my ears hurt so I stopped using them.

Is this where we talk about the Cyber Goggles?

AppleTV

Wait, which Apple TV?

AppleTV (the hardware): B

For the core use-case, putting internet video on my TV, it’s great. Great picture, the streaming never stutters, even the remote is decent now. It’s my main way to use my TV, and it’s a solid, reliable workhorse.

But look, that thing is a full-ass iPhone without a screen. It’s got more compute power than all of North America in the 70s! Is this really all we’re going to use this for? This is an old example, but the AppleTV feels like it could easily slide into being the 3rd or 2nd best game console with almost no effort, and it just… doesn’t.

AppleTV (the service): B

Ted Lasso notwithstanding, this is a service filled exclusively with stuff I have no interest in. I’m not even saying it’s bad! But a pass from me, chief.

AppleTV (the app): F

Absolute total garbage, just complete trash. I’ll go to almost any length to avoid using it.

Services: C

What’s left here?

iCloud drive? Works okay, I guess, but you’ll never convince me to rely on it.

Apple Arcade? It’s fine, other than it shouldn’t have to exist.

Apple Fitness? No opinion.

Apple News? Really subpar, with the trashiest ads I’ve seen in a while.

Apple Music? The service is outstanding, no notes. The app, however, manages to keep getting worse every OS update, at this point it’s kind of remarkable.

Apple Classical Music? This was the best you could do, really?

iTunes Match? I’m afraid to cancel. Every year I spent 15 bucks so I don’t have to learn which part of my cloud library will vanish.

There’s ones I’m not remembering, right? That’s my review of them.

Homekit: F

I have one homekit device in my house—a smart lightbulb. You can set the color temperature from the app! There is no power in the universe that would convince me to add a second.

HW Reliability: A

I don’t even have a joke about this. The hardware works. I mean, I still have to turn my mouse over to charge it, like it’s a defeated Koopa Troopa, but it charges every time!

SW Quality: D

Let me tell you a story.

For the better part of a decade, my daily driver was a 2013 15-inch MacBook Pro. In that time, I’m pretty sure it ran every OS X flavor from 10.9 to 10.14; we stopped at Mojave because there was some 32-bit only software we needed for work.

My setup was this: I had the laptop itself in the center of the desk, on a little stand, with the clamshell open. On either side, I had an external monitor. Three screens, where the built-in laptop one in the middle was smaller but effectively higher resolution, and the ones on the sides were physically larger but had slightly chunkier pixels. (Eventually, I got a smokin’ deal on some 4k BenQs on Amazon, and that distinction ceased.) A focus monitor in the center for what I was working on that was generally easier to read, and then two outboard monitors for “bonus content.”

The monitor on the right plugged into the laptop’s right-side HDMI port. The monitor on the left plugged into one of the Thunderbolt ports—this was the original thunderbolt when it still looked like firewire or mini-displayport—via a thunderbolt-to-mini-displayport cable. In front of the little stand, I had a wired Apple keyboard with the numeric keypad that plugged into the USB-A port on the left side. I had a wireless Apple mouse. Occasionally, I’d plug into the wired network connection with a thunderbolt-to-Cat6 adapter I kept in my equipment bag. The magsafe power connection clicked in on the left side. Four, sometimes five cables, each clicking into their respective port.

Every night, I’d close the lid, unplug the cables in a random order, and take the laptop home. The next morning, I’d come in, put the laptop down, plug those cables back in via another random order, open the lid, and—this is the important part—every window was exactly where I had left it. I had a “workspace” layout that worked for me—email and slack on the left side, web browser and docs on the right, IDE or text editor in the center. Various Finder windows on the left side pointing at the folders holding what I was working on.

I’d frequently, multiple times a week, unplug the laptop during the middle of the day, and hide over to another building, or a conference room, or the coffee shop. Sometimes I’d plug into another monitor, or a projector? Open the lid, those open windows would re-arrange themselves to what was available. It was smart enough to recognize that if there was only one external display, that was probably a projector, and not put anything on it except the display view of Powerpoint or Keynote.

Then, I’d come back to my desk, plug everything back in, open the lid, and everything was exactly where it was. It worked flawlessly, every time. I was about to type “like magic”, but that’s wrong. It didn’t work like magic, it worked like an extremely expensive professional tool that was doing the exact job I bought it to do.

My daily driver today is a 16-inch 2021 M1 MacBook Pro running, I think, macOS 12. The rest of my peripherals are the same: same two monitors, same keyboard, same mouse. Except now, I have a block of an dock on the left side of my desk for the keyboard and wired network drop.

In the nineteen months I’ve had this computer, let me tell you how many times I plugged the monitors back in and had the desktop windows in the same places they were before: Literally Never.

In fact, the windows wouldn’t even stay put when it went to sleep, much less when I closed the lid. The windows would all snap back to the central monitor, the desktops of the two side monitors would swap places. This never happened on the old rig over nearly a decade, and happens every time with the new one.

Here is what I had to do so that my email is still on the left monitor when I come back from lunch:

1. I have a terminal window running caffeinate all the time. Can’t let it go to sleep!
2. The cables from the two monitors are plugged into the opposite side of the computer from where they sit: the cables cross over in the back and plug into the far side
3. Most damning of all, I can’t use the reintroduced HDMI port, both monitors have to be plugged in via USB-C cables. The cable on the right, which needed an adapter to turn the HDMI cable to a USB-C/Thunderbolt connection is plugged into the USB-C port right next to the HDMI port, which is collecting dust. Can I use it? No, nothing works if that port is lit up.

Please don’t @-me with your solution, I guarantee you whatever you’re thinking of I tried it, I read that article, I downloaded that app. This took me a year to determine by trial and error, like I was a victorian scientist trying to measure the refraction of the æther, and I’m not changing anything now. It’s a laptop in name only, I haven’t closed the lid or moved it in months, and I’m not going to. God help me if I need to travel for work.

I’ve run some sketchy computers, I depended on the original OEM Windows 95 for over a year. I have never, in forty years, needed to deploy a rube goldberg–ass solution like this to keep my computer working right.

And everything is like this. I could put another thousand words here about things that worked great on the old rig—scratch that, that literally still work on the old rig—that just don’t function right on the new one. The hardware is so much better, but everything about using the computer is so much worse.

Screw the chat bubbles, get the DOJ working on why my nice monitors don’t work any more.

Dev Relations: D

Absolutely in the toilet, the worst I have ever seen it. See: just about everything above this. Long-time indie “for the love of the game” mac devs are just openly talking shit at this point. You know that Trust Thermocline we got all excited about as a concept a couple years ago? Yeah, we are well below that now.

Bluntly, the DOJ doesn’t move if all the developers working on the platform are happy and quiet.

I had an iOS-based project get scrapped in part because we weren’t willing to incur the risk of giving Apple total veto power over the product; that was five or six years ago now, and things have only decayed since then.

This is a D instead of an F because I’m quite certain it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Environ/Social: ¯_(ツ)_/¯

This category feels like one of those weird “no ethical consumption under capitalism” riddles. Grading on the curve of “silicon valley companies”, they’re doing great here. On the other hand, that bar is on the floor. Like, it’s great that they make it easy to recycle your old phones, but maybe just making it less of a problem to throw things out hasn’t really backed up to the fifth “why”, you know?

Potpurri: N/A

This isn’t a sixcolors category, but I”m not sure where to put the fact that I like my HomePod mini? It’s a great speaker!

Also, please start making a wifi router again, thanks.

What Now: ?

Originally, this all wrapped up with an observation that it’s great that the product design is firing on all cylinders and that services revenue is through the roof, but if they don’t figure out how to stop pissing off developers and various governments, things are going to get weird, but I just highlighted all that and hit delete because we’re all the way through that particular looking glass now.

Back in the 90s, there was nothing much else going on, and Microsoft was doing some openly, blatantly illegal shit. Here? There’s a lot else going on, and Apple are mostly just kinda jerks?

I think that here in 2024, if the Attorney General of the United States is inspired to redirect a single brain cell away from figuring out how to stop a racist game show host from overthrowing the government and instead towards the color of the text message bubbles on his kid’s phone, that means that Apple is Well and Truely Fucked. I think the DOJ is gonna carve into them like a swarm of coconut crabs that just found a stranded aviator.

Maybe they shoulder-roll through this, dodge the big hits, settle for a mostly-toothless consent decree. You’d be hard-pressed, from the outside, to point at anything meaningly different about Microsoft in 1999 vs 2002. But before they settled, they did a lot of stuff, put quite a few dents in the universe, to coin a phrase. Afterwards? Not a whole lot. Mostly, it kept them tied up so that they didn’t pay attention to what Google was doing. And we know that that went.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a modern case where antitrust action actually made things better for consumers. I mean, it’s great that Microsoft got slammed for folding IE into Windows, but that didn’t save Netscape, you know? And I was still writing CSS fills for IE6 a decade later. Roughing up Apple over ebooks didn’t fix anything. I’m not sure mandating that I need to buy new charge cables was solving a real problem. And with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure breaking up Ma Bell did much beyond make the MCI guy a whole lot of money. AT&T reformed like T2, just without the regulations.

The problem here is that it’s the fear of enforcement thats supposed to do the job, not the actual enforcement itself, but that gun won’t scare anyone if they don’t think you’ll ever fire it. (Recall, this is why the Deliverator carried a sword.) Instead, Apple’s particular brew of arrogance and myopic confidence called this all down on them.

Skimming the lawsuit, and the innumerable articles about the lawsuit, the things the DOJ complains about are about a 50/50 mix of “yeah, make them stop that right now”, and “no wait, I bought my iPhone for that on purpose!” The bit about “shapeshifting app store rules” is already an all-time classic, but man oh man do I not want the Feds to legislate iOS into android, or macOS into Windows. There’s a very loud minority of people who would never buy something from Apple (or Microsoft) on principal, and they really think every computer-like device should be forced to work like Ubuntu or whatever, and that is not what I bought my iPhone for.

I’m pessimistic that this is going to result in any actually positive change, in case that wasn’t coming through clearly. All I want is them to hold up their end of the deal they already offered. And make those upgrades cheaper. Quit trying to soak every possible cent out of every single transaction.

And let my monitors work right.

Playthings For The Alone

Previously on Icecano: Space Glasses, Apple Vision Pro: New Ways to be Alone.

I hurt my back at the beginning of January. (Wait! This isn’t about to become a recipe blog, or worse, a late-90s AICN movie review. This is gonna connect, bare with me.) I did some extremely unwise “lift with your back, not your knees” while trying to get our neutronium-forged artificial Christmas tree out of the house. As usual for this kind of injury, that wasn’t the problem, the problem was when I got overconfident while full of ibuprofen and hurt it asecond time at the end of January. I’m much improved now, but that’s the one that really messed me up. I have this back brace thing that helps a lot—my son has nicknamed it The Battle Harness, and yeah, if there was a He-Man character that was also a middle-aged programmer, that’s what I look like these days. This is one of those injuries where what positions are currently comfortable is an ever-changing landscape, but the consistant element has been that none of them allow me to use a screen and a keyboard at the same time. (A glace back at the Icecano archives since the start of the year will provided a fairly accurate summary of how my back was doing.)

One of the many results of this is that I’ve been reading way, way more reviews of the Apple Cyber Goggles than I was intending to. I’ve very much been enjoying the early reactions and reviews of the Apple Cyber Goggles, and the part I enjoy the most has been that I no longer need to have a professional opinion about them.

That’s a lie, actually my favorite part has been that as near as I can tell everyone seems to have individually invented “guy driving a cybertruck wearing vision pro”, which if I were Apple I’d treat as a 5-alarm PR emergency. Is anyone wearing these outside for any reason other than Making Content? I suspect not. Yet, anyway. Is this the first new Apple product that “normal people” immediately treated as being douchebag techbro trash? I mean, usually it gets dismissed as overly expensive hipster gear, but this feels different, somehow. Ed Zitron has a solid take on why: How Tech Outstayed Its Welcome.

Like jetpacks and hover cars before it, computers replacing screens with goggles is something science fiction decided was Going To Happen(tm). There’s a sense of inevitability about it, in the future we’re all going to use ski goggles to look at our email. If I was feeling better I’d go scare up some clips, but we’re all picturing the same things: Johnny Mnemonic, any cover art for any William Gibson book, that one Michael Douglas / Demi Moore movie, even that one episode of Murder She Wrote where Mrs. Potts puts on a Nintendo Power Glove and hacks into the Matrix.

(Also, personal sidebar: something I learned about myself the last couple of weeks is somehow I’ve led a life where in my mid-40s I can type “mnemonic” perfectly the first time every time, and literally can never write “johnny” without making a typo.)

But I picked jetpacks and hover cars on purpose—this isn’t something like Fusion Power that everyone also expects but stubbornly stays fifty years into the future, this is something that keeps showing up and turning out to not actually be a good idea. Jetpacks, it turns out, are kinda garbage in most cases? Computers, but for your face, was a concept science fiction latched on to long before anyone writing in the field had used a computer for much, and the idea never left. And people kept trying to build them! I used to work with a guy who literally helped build a prototype face-mounted PC during the Reagan administration, and he was far from the first person to work on it. Heck, I tried out a prototype VR headset in the early 90s. But the reality on the ground is that what we actually use computers for tends to be a bad fit for big glasses.

I have a very clear memory of watching J. Mnemonic the first time with an uncle who was probably the biggest science fiction fan of all time. The first scene where Mr. Mnemonic logs into cyberspace, and the screen goes all stargate as he puts on his ski goggles and flies into the best computer graphics that a mid-budget 1995 movie can muster, I remember my uncle, in full delight and without irony, yelling “that’s how you make a phone call!” He’d have ordered one of these on day one. But you know what’s kinda great about my actual video phone I have in my pocket he didn’t live to see? It just connects to the person I’m calling instead of making me fly around the opening credits of Tron first.

Partly because it’s such a long-established signifier of the future, and lots of various bits of science fiction have made them look very cool, there’s a deep, built-up reservoir of optimism and good will about the basic concept, despite many of the implementations being not-so-great. And because people keep taking swings at it, like jetpacks, face-mounted displays have carved out a niche where they excel. (VR; games mostly, for jetpacks: the opening of James Bond movies.)

And those niches have gotten pretty good! Just to be clear: Superhot VR is one of my favorite games of all time. I do, in fact, own an Oculus from back when they still used that name, and there’s maybe a half-dozen games where the head-mounted full-immersion genuinely results in a different & better experience than playing on a big screen.

And I think this has been one of the fundamental tensions around this entire space for the last 40 years: there’s a narrow band of applications where they’re clearly a good idea, but science fiction promised that these are the final form. Everyone wants to join up with Case and go ride with the other Console Jockeys. Someday, this will be the default, not just the fancy thing that mostly lives in the cabinet.

The Cyber Goggles keep making me thing about the Magic Leap. Remember them? Let me tell you a story. For those of you who have been living your lives right, Magic Leap is a startup who’ve been working on “AR goggles” for some time now. Back when I had to care about this professionally, we had one.

The Leap itself, was pair of thick goggles. I think there was a belt pack with a cable? I can’t quite remember now. The lenses were circular and mostly clear. It had a real steampunk dwarf quality, minus the decorative gears. The central feature was that the lenses were clear, but had an embedded transparent display, so the virtual elements would overlay with real life. It was heavy, heavier than you wanted it to be, and the lenses had the quality of looking through a pair of very dirty glasses, or walking out of a 3D movie without giving the eyewear back. You could see, but you could tell the lenses were there. But it worked! It did a legitimately amazing job of drawing computer-generated images over the real world, and they really looked like they were there, and then you could dismiss them, and you were back to looking at the office through Thorin’s welding goggles.

What was it actually do though? It clearly wasn’t sure. This was shortly after google glass, and it had a similar approach to being a stand-along device running “cut down” apps. Two of them have stuck in my memory.

The first was literally Angy Birds. But it projected the level onto the floor of the room you were in, blocks and pigs and all, so you could walk around it like it was a set of discarded kids toys. Was it better than “regular” angry birds? No, absolutely not, but it was a cool demo. The illusion was nearly perfect, the scattered blocks really stayed in the same place.

The second was the generic productivity apps. Email, calendar, some other stuff. I think there was a generic web browser? It’s been a while. They lived in these virtual screens, rectangles hanging in air. You could position them in space, and they’d stay there. I took a whole set of these screens and arrayed them in the air about and around my desk. I had three monitors in real life, and then another five or six virtual ones, each of the virtual ones showing one app. I could glance up, and see a whole array of summary information. The resolution was too low to use them for real work, and the lenses themselves were too cloudy to use my actual computer while wearing them.

You can guess the big problem though: I coudn’t show them to anybody. Anything I needed to share with a coworker needed to be on one of the real screens, not the virtual ones. Theres nothing quite so isolating as being able to see things no one else can see.

That’s stuck with me all these years. Those virtual screens surrounding my desk. That felt like something. Now, Magic Leap was clearly not the company to deliver a full version of that, even then it was clear they weren’t the ones to make a real go of the idea. But like I said, it stuck with me. Flash forward, and Apple goes and makes that one of the signature features of their cyber goggles.

I can’t ever remember a set of reviews for a new product that were trying this hard to get past the shortcomings and like the thing they were imagining. I feel like most reviews of this thing can be replaced with a clip from that one Simpson’s episode where Homer buys the first hover car, but it sucks, and Bart yells over the wind “Why’d you buy the first hover car ever made?”, to which Homer gleefully responds with “I know! It’s a hover car!” as the car rattles along, bouncing off the ground.

It’s clear what everyone suspected back over the summer is true; this isn’t the “real” product, this is a sketch, a prototype, a test article that Tim Apple is charging 4 grand to test. And, good for him, honestly. The “real” Apple Vision is probably rev 3 or 4, coming in 2028 or thereabouts.

I’m stashing the links to all the interesting ones I read here, mostly so I can find them again. (I apologize to those of you to whom this is a high-interest open tabs balance transfer.)

• Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not - The Verge
• Apple Vision Pro Review: The Best Headset Yet Is Just a Glimpse of the Future - WSJ
• Daring Fireball: The Vision Pro
• The Apple Vision Pro: A Review
• Michael Tsai - Blog - Apple Vision Pro Reviews
• Apple Vision Pro hands-on, again, for the first time - The Verge
• Hypercritical: Spatial Computing
• Manton Reece - Apple needs a flop
• Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro | Vanity Fair
• The Apple Vision Pro Is Spectacular and Sad - The Atlantic
• Daring Fireball: Simple Tricks and Nonsense
• All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Pro — Wait But Why

But my favorite summary was from Today in Tabs The Business Section:

This is all a lot to read and gadget reviews are very boring so my summary is: the PDF Goggles aren’t a product but an expensive placeholder for a different future product that will hypothetically provide augmented reality in a way that people will want to use, which isn’t this way. If you want to spend four thousand dollars on this placeholder you definitely already know that, and you don’t need a review to find out.

The reviews I thought were the most interesting were the ones from Thompson and Zitron; They didn’t get review units, they bought them with their own money and with very specific goals of what they wanted to use them for, which then slammed into the reality of what the device actually can do:

• The Apple Vision Pro – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
• The Apple Vision Pro: A Review

Both of those guys really, really wanted to use their cyber goggles as a primary productivity tool, and just couldn’t. It’s not unlike the people who tried really hard to make their iPad their primary computer—you know who you are; hey man, how ya doing?—it’s possible, but barely.

There’s a definite set of themes across all that:

• The outward facing “eyesight” is not so great
• The synthetic faces for video calls as just as uncanny valley weird as we thought
• Watching movies is really, really cool—everyone really seems to linger on this one
• Big virtual screens for anything other than movies and other work seems mixed
• But why is this, though? “What’s the problem this is solving?”

Apple, I think at this point, has earned the benefit of the doubt when they launch new things, but I’ve spent the last week reading this going, “so that’s it, huh?” Because okay, it’s the thing from last summer. There’s no big “aha, this is why they made this”.

There’s a line from the first Verge hands-on, before the full review, where the author says:

I know what I saw, but I’m still trying to figure out where this headset fits in real life.

Ooh, ooh, pick me! I know! It’s a Plaything For The Alone.

They know—they know—that headsets like this are weird and isolating, but seem to have decided to just shrug, accept that as the cost of doing business. As much as they pay lip service to being able to dial into the real world, this is more about dialing out, about tuning out the world, about having an experience only you can have. They might not be by themselves, but they’re Alone.

A set of sci-fi sketches as placeholders for features, entertaining people who don’t have anyone to talk to.

My parents were over for the Super Bowl last weekend. Sports keep being cited as a key feature for the cyber goggles, cool angles, like you’re really there. I’ve never in my life watched sports by myself. Is the idea that everyone will have their own goggles for big games? My parents come over with their own his-and-hers headsets, we all sit around with these things strapped to our faces and pass snacks around? Really? There’s no on-court angle thats better than gesturing wildly at my mom on the couch next to me.

How alone do you have to be to even think of this?

With all that said, what’s this thing for? Not the future version, not the science fiction hallucination, this thing you can go out and buy today? A Plaything for the Alone, sure, but to what end?

The consistent theme I noticed, across nearly every article I read, was that just about everyone stops and mentions that thing where you can sit on top of mount hood and watch a movie by yourself.

Which brings me back around to my back injury. I’ve spent the last month-and-change in a variety of mostly inclined positions. There’s basically nowhere to put a screen or a book that’s convenient for where my head needs to be, so in addition to living on ibuprofen, I’ve been bored out of my mind.

And so for a second, I got it. I’m wedged into the couch, looking at the TV at a weird angle, and, you know what? Having a screen strapped to my face that just oriented to where I could look instead of where I wanted to look sounded pretty good. Now that you mention it, I could go for a few minutes on top of Mount Hood.

All things considered, as back injuries go, I had a pretty mild one. I’ll be back to normal in a couple of weeks, no lasting damage, didn’t need professional medical care. But being in pain/discomfort all day is exhausting. I ended up taking several days off work, mostly because I was just to tired to think or talk to anyone. There’d be days where I was done before sundown; not that I didn’t enjoy hanging out with my kids when they got home from school, but I just didn’t have any gas left in the tank to, you know, say anything. I was never by myself, but I frequently needed to be alone.

And look, I’m lucky enough that when I needed to just go feel sorry for myself by myself, I could just go upstairs. And not everyone has that. Not everyone has something making them exhausted that gets better after a couple of weeks.

The question every one keeps asking is “what problem are these solving?”

Ummm, is the problem cities?

When they announced this thing last summer, I thought the visual of a lady in the cramped IKEA demo apartment pretending to be out on a mountain was a real cyberpunk dystopia moment, life in the burbclaves got ya down? CyberGoggles to the rescue. But every office I ever worked in—both cube farms and open-office bullpens—was full of people wearing headphones. Trying to blot out the noise, literal and figurative, of the environment around them and focus on something. Or just be.

Are these headphones for the eyes?

Maybe I’ve been putting the emphasis in the wrong place. They’re a Plaything for the Alone, but not for those who are by themselves, but for those who wish they could be.

40 years of…

Just about 40 years ago, my Dad brought something home that literally changed my life. It was a computer—a home computer, which was still on the edge of being science fiction—but more than that, it was a portal. It was magic, a box of endless possibilities. It’s not even remotely hyperbole to say that bringing that computer home, which had just been released into the world, utterly changed the entire trajectory of my life.

I am, of course, talking about the Tandy 1000.

That’s not how you expected that sentence to end, was it? Because this year is also the 40th anniversary of the Mac. But I want to spend a beat talking about the other revolutionary, trend-setting computer from 1984, before we talk about the ancestor of the computer I’m writing this on now.

I’ve been enjoying everyone’s lyrical memories of the original Mac very much, but most have a slightly revisionist take that the once that original Mac landed in ’84 that it was obviously the future. Well, it was obviously a future. It’s hard to remember now how unsettled the computer world was in the mid-80s. The Tandy 1000, IBM AT, and Mac landed all in ’84. The first Amiga would come out the next year. The Apple IIgs and original Nintendo the year after that. There were an absurd number of other platforms; Commodore 64s were selling like hotcakes, Atari was still making computers, heck, look at the number of platforms Infocom released their games for. I mean, the Apple ][ family still outsold the Mac for a long time.

What was this Tandy you speak of, then?

Radio Shack started life as a company to supply amateur radio parts to mostly ham radio operators, and expanded into things like hi-fi audio components in the 50s. In one of the greatest “bet it all on the big win” moves I can think of, the small chain was bought by—of all people—the Tandy Leather Company in the early 60s. They made leather goods for hobbyists and crafters, and wanted to expand into other hobby markets. Seeing no meaningful difference between leather craft hobbyists and electronics ones, Charles Tandy bought the chain, and reworked and expanded the stores, re-envisioning them as, basically, craft stores for electronics.

I want to hang on that for a second. Craft stores, but for amateur electronics engineers.

It’s hard to express now, in this decayed age, how magical a place Radio Shack was. It seems ridiculous to even type now. If you were the kind of kid who were in any way into electronics, or phones in the old POTS Ma Bell sense, or computery stuff, RadioShack was the place. There was one two blocks from my house, and I loved it.

When home computers started to become a thing, they came up through the hobbyist world; Radio Shack was already making their own parts and gizmos, it was a short distance to making their own computers. Their first couple of swings, the TRS-80 and friends, were not huge hits, but not exactly failures either. Apple came out of this same hobbyist world, then IBM got involved because they were already making “big iron”, could they also make “little iron”?

For reasons that seem deeply, deeply strange four decades later, when IBM built their first PC, instead of writing their own operating system, they chose to license one from a little company outside of Seattle called Microsoft—maybe you’ve heard of them—with terms that let Gates and friends sell their new OS to other manufacturers. Meanwhile, for other reasons, equally strange, the only part of the IBM PC actually exclusive to IBM was the BIOS, the rest was free to be copied. So this whole little market formed where someone could build a computer that was “IBM Compatible”—again, maybe you’ve heard of this—buy the OS from that outfit up in Redmond, and take advantage of the software and hardware that was already out there. The basic idea that software should work on more than one kind of computer was starting to form.

One of the first companies to take a serious swing at this was Tandy, with the Tandy 2000. In addition to stretching the definition of “compatible” to the breaking point, it was one of the very few computers to ever use the Intel 80186, and was bought by almost no one, except, though a series of events no one has ever been able to adequately explain to me, my grandmother. (I feel I have to stress this isn’t a joke, Grandma wrote a sermon a week on that beast well into the late 90s. Continuing her track record for picking technology, she was also the only person I knew with a computer that ran Windows Me.)

As much as the original IBM PC was a “home computer”, it was really a small office computer, so IBM tried to make a cut down, cheaper version of the PC for home use, for real this time. I am, of course, talking about infamous flop the IBM PCjr, also 40 years old this year, and deserving its total lack of retrospective articles.

Tandy, meanwhile, had scrambled a “better PCjr” to market, the Tandy 1000. When the PCjr flopped, Tandy pivoted, and found they had the only DOS-running computer on the market with all the positives of the PCjr, but with a keyboard that worked.

Among these positives, the Tandy 1000 had dramatically better graphics and sound than anything IBM was selling. “Tandy Graphics” was a step up from CGA but not quite to EGA, and the “Tandy Sound” could play three notes at once! Meanwhile, the Tandy also came with something called DeskMate, an app suite / operating environment that included a text editor, spreadsheet, calendar, basic database with a text-character-based GUI.

So they found themselves in a strange new market: a computer that could do “business software”, both with what was built-in and what was already out there, but could also do, what are those called? Oh yeah, games.

The legend goes that IBM commissioned the nacent Sierra On-Line to write the first King’s Quest to show off the PCjr; when that flopped Sierra realized that Tandy was selling the only computer that could run their best game, and Tandy realized there was a hit game out there that could only run on their rigs. So they both leaned all the way in.

But of course, even the Tandy couldn’t match “arcade games”, so the capabilities and limits helped define what a “PC game” was. Adventure games, flight sims, RPGs. And, it must be said, both the words “operating” and “system” in MS-DOS were highly asperational. But what it lacked in features it made up for in being easy to sweep to the side and access the hardware directly, which is exactly what you want if you’re trying to coax game-quality performance out of the stone knives and bearskins of 80s home computers. Even when the NES cemented the “home console” market that Atari had sketched in a couple years later, “PC games” had already developed their own identity vs “console games”.

Radio Shacks got a whole corner, or more, turned over to their new computers. They had models out running programs you could play with, peripherals you could try, and most critically, a whole selection of software. I can distinctly remember the Radio Shack by my house with a set of bookstore-like shelves with what was at the time every game yet made by Sierra, Infocom, and everyone else at the time. Probably close to every DOS game out there. I have such clear memories of poring over the box to Starflight, or pulling Hitch-hiker’s Guide off the shelf, or playing Lode Runner on the demo computer.

A home computer with better graphics and sound than its contemporaries, pre-loaded with most of what you need to get going, and supported by its very own retail store? Does that sound familiar?

I’m cheating the timeline a little here, the Tandy 1000 didn’t release until November, and we didn’t get ours until early ’85. I asked my Dad once why he picked the one he did, of all the choices available, and he said something to the effect of he asked the “computer guy” at work which one he should get, and that guy indicated that he’d get the Tandy, since it would let you do the most different kinds of things.

Like I said at the top, it was magic. We’re so used to them now that it’s hard to remember, but I was so amazed that here was this thing, and it would do different things based on what you told it to do! I was utterly, utterly fascinated.

One of the apps Dad bought with computer was that first King's Quest, I was absolutely transfixed that you could drive this little guy around on the screen. I’d played arcade games—I’d probably already sunk a small fortune into Spy Hunter—but this was different. You could do things. Type what you thought of! Pushing the rock aside to find a hole underneath was one of those “the universe was never the same again” moments for me. I could barely spell, and certainly couldn’t type, but I was hooked. Somewhere, and this still exists, my Mom wrote a list of words on a sheet of paper for me to reference how to spell: look, take, shove.

And I wasn’t the only one, both of my parents were as fascinated as I was. My mom sucked down every game Infocom and Sierra ever put out. The Bard's Tale) landed a year later, and my parent’s played that obsessively.

It was a family obsession, this weird clunky beige box in the kitchen. Portals to other worlds, the centerpiece of our family spending time together. Four decades on, my parents still come over for dinner once a week, and we play video games together. (Currently, we’re still working on Tears of the Kingdon, because we’re slow.)

Everyone has something they lock onto between about 6 and 12 that’s their thing from that point on. Mine was computers. I’ve said many, many times how fortunate I feel that I lived at just the right time for my thing to turn into a pretty good paying career by the time I was an adult. What would I be doing to pay this mortgage if Dad hadn’t brought that Tandy box into the house 40 years ago? I literally have no idea.

Time marched on.

Through a series of tremendous own-goals, Radio Shack and Tandy failed to stay on top of, or even competitive in, the PC market they helped create, until as the Onion said: Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business.

Meanwhile, through a series of maneuvers that, it has to be said, were not entirely legal, Microsoft steadily absorbed most of the market, with the unsettled market of the 80s really coalescing into the Microsoft-Intel “IBM Compatible” platform with the release of Windows 95.

Of all the players I mentioned way back at the start, the Mac was the only other one that remained, even the Apple ][, originally synonymous with home computers, had faded away. Apple had carved out a niche for the Mac for things that could really take advantage of the UI, mainly desktop publishing, graphic design, and your one friend’s Dad.

Over the years, I’d look over at the Mac side of the house with something approaching jealousy. Anyone who was “a computer person” in the 90s ended up “bilingual”, more-or-less comfortable on both Windows and Mac Classic. I took classes in graphic design, so I got pretty comfortable with illustrator or Aldus Pagemaker in the Mac.

I was always envious of the hardware of the old Mac laptops, which developed into open lust when those colored iBooks came out. The one I wanted the most, though, was that iMac G4 - Wikipedia with the “pixar lamp” design.

But the thing is, they didn’t do what I was mostly using a computer for. I played games, and lots of them, and for a whole list of reasons, none of those games came out for the Mac.

If ’84 saw the release of both the first Mac, and one of the major foundation stones of the modern Windows PC platform, and I just spent all that time singing the praises of my much missed Tandy 1000, why am I typing this blog post on a MacBook Pro? What happened?

Let me spin you my framework for understanding the home computer market. Invoking the Planescape Rule-of-Threes, there are basically three demographics of people who buy computers:

1. Hobbyists. Tinkerers. People who are using computers as a source of self-actualization. Hackers, in the classical sense, not the Angelina Jolie sense.
2. People who look at the computer market and thought, “I bet I make a lot of money off of this”.
3. People who had something else to do, and thought, “I wonder if I could use a computer to help me do that?”

As the PC market got off the ground, it was just that first group, but then the other two followed along. And, of course, the people in the second group quickly realized that the real bucks were to be made selling stuff to that first group.

As the 80s wound on, the first and second group clustered on computers running Microsoft, and the third group bought Macs. Once we get into the late 90s the hobbyist group gets split between Microsoft and Linux.

(As an absolutely massive aside, this is the root of the weird cultural differences between “Apple people” and “Linux people”. The kind of people who buy Apples do so specifically so they don’t have to tinker, and the kinds of people who build Linux boxes do so specifically so that they can. If you derive a sense of self from being able to make computers do things, Apples are nanny-state locked-down morally suspect appliances, and if you just want to do some work and get home on time and do something else, Linux boxes are massively unreliable Rube Goldberg toys for people who aren’t actually serious.)

As for me? What happened was, I moved from being in the first group to the third. No, that’s a lie. What actually happened was I had a kid, and realized I had always been in the third group. I loved computers, but not for their own sake, I loved them for the other things I could with them. Play games, write text, make art, build things; they were tools, the means to my ends, not an end to themselves. I was always a little askew from most of the other “computer guys” I was hanging out with; I didn’t want to spend my evening recompiling sound drivers, I wanted to do somethat that required the computer to play sound, and I always slightly resented it when the machine required me to finish making the sausage myself. But, that’s just how it was, the price of doing business. Want to play Wing Commander with sound? You better learn how Himem works.

As time passed, and we rolled into the 21st century, and the Mac moved to the BSD-based OS X, and then again to Intel processors, I kept raising my eyebrows. The Mac platform was slowly converging into something that might do what I wanted it to do?

The last Windows PC I built for myself unceremoniously gave up the ghost sometime in 2008 or 9, I can’t remember. I needed a new rig, but our first kid was on the way, and I realized my “game playing” time had already shrunk to essentially nil. And, by this time I had an iPhone, and trying to make that work with my WindowsXP machine was… trying. So, I said, what the hell, and bought a refurbed 2009 polycarb MacBook). And I never looked back.

I couldn’t believe how easy it was to use. Stuff just worked! The built-in apps all did what they were supposed to do! Closing the laptop actually put the computer to sleep! It still had that sleep light that looked like breathing. The UI conventions were different from what I was used to on Windows for sure, but unlike what I was used to, they were internally consistent, and had an actual conceptual design behind them. You could actually learn how “the Mac” worked, instead of having to memorize a zillion snowflakes like Windows. And the software! Was just nice. There’s a huge difference in culture of software design, and it was like I could finally relax once I changed teams. It wasn’t life-changing quite the way that original Tandy was, but it was a fundamental recalibration in my relationship with computers. To paraphrase all those infomercials, it turns out there really was a better way.

So, happy birthday, to both of my most influential computers of the last forty years. Here’s to the next forty.

But see if you can pick up some actual games this time.

“Oh Bubbles, there’s always something wrong with you”

There’s a whole bunch of genuinely interesting stuff going on with smartphone text-based messaging lately. You’ve got stuff about interop, product design, protocols, encryption, “platform ecosystems”, vendor lock-in (good), vendor lock-in (derogatory), standards design, standards maintenance, features vs security tradeoffs, it’s quite the nexus of 21st century tech product design concerns.

However, there is also a doorbuster sale going on at the Hot Takes Outlet^tm.

So, I thought I would share my foolproof heuristic technique for deciding if an article is worth reading. Here is is:

If the article mentions the color of the bubbles on the iPhone in either the title or the first paragraph, it’s hot garbage.

Something about those bubbles cause otherwise sane people to become absolutely deranged.

“We want to have blue bubbles!”

“Well, sure, the good news is all you gotta do is buy an iPhone.”

“We don’t want to do that! Iphones suck!”

The sheer entitlement of folks to want someone to sell them something, but only on their terms. Like, no? You need to find something valuable to fill your life with.

There’s some really interesting points about encryption and security? But those people don’t lead with the bubble color.

Don’t guess when you can ask

I upgraded my iPhone recently, which always means a settling in period of figuring out how best to customize this combination of hardware and operating system.

The iPhone has this theoretically-cool feature where it will charge the phone to “almost full” overnight, and then at the last possible second, charge it all the way to 100%. Supposedly, this keeps the battery healthy longer, as sitting on power at full charge is stressful on the battery. And sure, I’ll buy that.

But the problem is that there’s no way to tell it when you need the phone to be full! Instead, it does a bunch of computer super-science to figure out your schedule and do all this automatically and in the background. When it works, you never notice.

When it works.

The problem, which should be obvious, is what happens when you don’t get up at the same time every day? And here, I’m using “get up” as a shorthand for “need the phone at full.” My schedule isn’t totally consistant; on a regular but hard-to-predict basis I need to be fully operational an hour or two earlier than “normal”. And then, I’ve recently had a change in schedule where “normal” has rolled back by an hour. (On top of DST ending, etc.)

And so my phone is never full when I pull it off the nightstand. The proposed solution is to hit the button to tell it to charge to full. But that takes time, time I don’t have because I’m on an early day. Plus, I just had it plugged in for eight hours! Why do I need to wait another half of one?

But most maddeningly, I knew I had to get moving earlier the night before! And there was no way to tell the phone this! I mean, I’ll even ignore the fact that there should be an API that my sleep tracker app can use to tell the battery charger what time the alarm is set for. All I want is a thing where I can say “gotta be ready by 7 tomorrow, chief.” Or even, “always be ready by 7, and most days that’ll mean an extra hour or two of full battery burn, that’s okay, no worries.”

But instead of that one UI element, we have an entire house of algorithmic cards trying to guess what I already know. And this is such a common failure mode for software product design—so fearful of asking the user for something that we build a Rube Goldberg machine that makes the whole thing useless.

My last phone (or two) I finally had to turn it off completely and just let it charge “normally” overnight. But I think every phone upgrade I’ve ever done has been precipitated by the battery giving out. If you tell me a feature gets me more battery life, I’m in! I’m motivated to make that work. But here I am, having to charge up my phone over lunch because it didn’t start full, about to do that again.

All because someone decided they could get a computer to guess something the user already knew. Apps are not slight of hand magicians, trying to guess my card. It’s okay! You can just ask.

Don’t guess when you can ask.

Apple Music vs(?) The Beatles

Thanks to the “new” song, the Beatles have made there way back into regular rotation around Icecano Headquarters. Back during iTunes’ “Rip. Mix. Burn.” period I had a carefully curated set of MP3s I ripped from CD and painfully filled in all the ID3 tags. (For context, this was just after the last elf had sailed over the sea).

I used to use this as a way to describe both my first iPod and first iPhone—“Look! You can fit every Beatles song on here!!” Somewhere along the line, those MP3s got replaced with the iTunes Match upgraded versions.

But that was all few iPhones back; these days I’m mostly an Apple Music user (while those old MP3s sit on my post-Ragnarok Drobo.)

Overall, I like Apple Music a lot. Sure, vendor ecosystem lock-in and all, but the music sounds great, doesn’t cost too much for the family plan, and it works with all of my gear.

As I recall, it was kind of a big deal when the Beatles finally made it into Apple Music—they were one of the last holdouts, and Apple made quite a splash when it finally happened. And you can tell! All albums have slightly animated cover art—the lines on Magical Mystery Tour alternate colors, the line art caricatures of the four of them on Revolver blink and look side to side. Apple also has the new(er) remixes and remasters in addition to the original flavors, the new edits, especially Abbey Road, sound great; sounds like it could have been recorded last week instead of 50-plus years ago. (There’s a few songs here and there that don’t sound quite like I remember them, but sure.)

Which all brings me to the point: one of the other things I like Apple Apple Music the editorial stuff: curated playlists, recommendations, editorial notes. (I think in general the music editorial stuff is better than its counterparts in say, the app stores.). So, having not really poked around in the Beatles catalog in Apple Music, I was curious about what the anonymous apple music editors would have to say about the Beatles’ albums. What even new was there to say that hadn’t already been said? But, given how much attention they drew to the Beatles arriving on the service, they must have made the effort to do something.

Faced with this challenge, Apple found an absolutely innovative, if deranged, solution: hire someone who doesn’t really like the Beatles, but loves Bob Dylan.

I know, you think I am exaggerating. So, for example, check out the start of the description of Revolver, which might be their best album:

That’s… an absolutely insane way to start. Why is Bob Dylan’s probably-apocryphal backhanded compliment the lede of the description of Revolver?

(For the record, these are only excerpts, the full descriptions go on and on and on. Apple Music subscribers can verify read the rest as an exercise for the reader, for everyone else, you aren not missing much.)

Okay, maybe that’s a weird outlier, trying to start with a joke and landing badly. Let’s check in on their next album, Sgt. Pepper, one of the greatest albums of all time. Whole books have been written about this, where does that start?

Okay, so, that’s a not a paragraph written by someone that likes this album, or even recognizes it has any value. That sounds like Martin Scorcese slagging off on another Marvel movie. But most importantly, why is Bob Dylan here again? By my count, that two sentences of non-praise for the album under discussion, and then unreserved praise for Blonde on Blonde , which the author wants to make sure we all know came first. What is happening?

We stagger backwards through the catalog, and find that Bob Dyan makes another cameo appearance in Beatles for Sale:

Are we really claiming that one of the most interesting things about their 4th album (and 4th in two years) is that… Bob Dylan… smoked them out in New York City?

But the most amazing appearance by Bob is on A Hard Days Night. Recall: huge hit, came hand-in-hand with the hugely innovative and successful movie. There’s so much to talk about here! Richard Lester, the birth of the music video, continued success and innovation. That chord! But, no, what’s really important is Bob Dylan:

What in the literal hell is this? Three whole paragraphs centered around the fact that Bob Dylan once heard the Beatles on the radio?

Is… is the author of these really trying to claim that the source of the Beatles’ legitimacy is that Bob Dylan knew who they were? Look, Bob Dylan is great and all, but there is no reality where Bob Dylan’s option has any bearing on the legitimacy of a Beatles album. (The other way around, maybe.)

That’s four out of thirteen albums that have an unexpected cameo appearance by Bob. That’s absolutely bonkers. How did this make it out of the door?

While Bob doesn’t make any more appearances, the other album descriptions are equally pathological. Check out their first album, which hit the top of the charts, stayed their for six months, and then was only knocked down by their second album:

Let’s recap, shall we? Apple Music, which is owned by Apple Inc, founded by such a massive Beatles fan that he named his company after the Beatles’ own Apple Corps company; that Apple Music wants you to know that the Beatles were basically idiots who got lucky and whom Bob Dylan smoked out and was rude about.

What? What?

I assume I’m late to this party, but how did this happen? I get that there is literally no one on earth who needs “more praise” less than the Beatles, but why on earth is this what they went with?

How does this person’s editor not stop and say, “look, maybe dial back the Bob Dylan references a tad.” Even worse, maybe they did, and that’s why Bob only get mentions on four instead of all thirteen.

But then I got curious. Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde gets mentioned by name twice—how does Apple Music describe that album?

Unlike the endless editorials on the Beatles Albums, Blonde on Blonde has a single crisp paragraph:

Delicious.

The person who wrote the Beatles album liners was jealous they didn’t get to do Dylan, got it.

So Long, Apple Trailers, and thanks for all the fish

Well, they finally pulled the plug on iTunes Movie Trailers. Starting life as a website to showcase the then-new Quicktime video format, it evolved into an iOS ecosystem app, and quietly spent two decades as the best way to see trailers for new movies. It made it a long time; my first memory of it was using the original web version to slowly load the first teaser for Episode I over dialup.

I’ve seen some speculation that this was all part of a rebranding exercise to redirect traffic to the Apple TV app (not to be confused with the Apple TV streaming service, or the Apple TV hardware product,) I suspect it’s more likely that whomever had been keeping it running since the late 90s had finally retired? Or maybe it really just didn’t fit in with Apple’s expanding streaming/services future.

So a moment, then, to note the passing of a small, single-purpose service that did one thing, and did it perfectly. Becase that’s all it did—had a library of trailers for upcoming and recent movies. Search, sort, organize by release date. High quality video, no muss, no fuss, no other advertising glop. It was remarkably up to date, had a trailer for basically every new movie, and frequently had any other EPK-type promo video as well.

It was a constant on my Apple TV (the hardware). “Hey’ let’s see if there’s any new trailers!” was a common request in the house. It was fun, it was simple, we liked it. So yeah, they shut it down. Two months or so past the shutdown, it’s left a surprisingly big hole! What are the alternatives we’re left with?

It goes without saying that the Trailers section of the Apple TV app, like all other sections of that app, is unmitigated hot garbage. Not only is it hard to find, but it doesn’t even have all the trailers from the old app! Bad sorting, no release dates, and it doesn’t seem to be nearly as complete or updated near as often.

YouTube seems to be the standard answer, but that’s also such a step back. Sure, all the trailers are there, somewhere. But, search on the Apple TV’s (the hardware) Youtube app is terrible, and every trailer has dozens of crappy copies, re-uploaded with somebody else’s watermarks, or other ads tacked on the front, or some guy “reacting” to it, or worst of all, it’s not the real thing at all, just some fan edit. And sure, that’s YouTube, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I just want the damn trailer. YouTube’s biggest problem is the amount of noise to signal; which is great if you’re looking for the noise, but sometimes you want to go watch the actual signal, you know?

And like so many things from the early web, we used to have a thing just for that which perfectly, but now it’s just gone, with no real replacement. The world doesn’t get smaller, but it sure keeps getting emptier.

Let me rephrase what I said up at the start: I hope they shut it down because someone retired. It would be beyond depressing if they killed off a perfect single-use (and probably cheap) service that we all liked that did one thing really well because it wasn’t making a 300% return on investment for some streaming sub-division.

Feature Request: Sick Mode for Apple Fitness

As previously mentioned I got pretty sick in October. I’m also a daily Apple Watch wearer, which means there were two solid weeks there where I didn’t close my rings.

As such, I have a feature request: you should be able to tell Apple Fitness you’re sick.

To be clear, this isn’t because I want a way to cheat my streak back into existence. I mean, I had a pretty good streak going, and it’s irritating to reset that count, but that’s not the point.

While I was sick, it was deeply irritating to get those passive agressive “motivating” messages in the morning about “You closed one ring yesterday, bet you can get them all today, go get ‘em!” No man, leave me alone, I’m dying here. There’s a way to delve into the settings and turn off the “coach notifications”, but I was not up to that. I needed one button I could mash; I’m sick, I’ll let you know when I’m better.

Then, once I got better, all my stats and graphs and whatnot have these huge gaps in them. I don’t want to skip those or leave those out, but I would love to have a way to annotate those with a note: “this is when you had covid, ignore this”. Maybe a different color? Yellow for sick, instead of the usual red, green, blue.

But what really frustrates me is whats going on now. Apple Fitness does this genuinely cool and useful thing where it’ll compute long-term trends and averages, and tell you about it when they change significantly. And so for the last week I keep getting updates about “you have a new trend!” and then it shows me how many more steps I’ve taken this week versus the average over October.

And no shit, Apple Fitness! I basically didn’t stand up for ten days there, I sure hope I’m taking more steps now. What would be valuable is to know what my current scores are versus before I got sick. Am I back to where I was? I should be back to where I was in september, am I?

And there’s no way to ask that question. There’s no way to tell it what it needs to know to figure that out itself.

We’re living in the Plague Years, Apple. Let us tell the computers about it.

So long, tiny dancer

We’ll miss you iPhone mini, come back soon

As widely rumored, Apple discontinued the mini-sized iPhone last week. It was my favorite.

I’ve been a (mostly) happy iPhone customer since I saw the original in person over the summer ’07. I’ve never been an “upgrade every year” guy, or even every-other-year; but I’ve ended up with a new one every three or four years as batteries run down and the software baseline outstrips the aging hardware.

My least favorite thing about them is that they’ve gotten so big.

My all-time favorite form factor was the 5s. Bigger than the original, but still easily used in one hand. (And still had the headphone jack!) I loved the flat sides and all-glass front—in my mind, that’s the classic look. The iPhone’s version of the ’67 corvette.

My least favorite, by comparison, was my next phone, the iPhone 8. Too big, too clunky, I deeply disliked the overly thin body and rounded edges. Of course, that design, originally from the 6, ended up as their longest-running design, becoming the soft of default iPhone look for most people.

And they just kept getting bigger. Pros, Maxes. I’ve got decently large male hands, and I found the new ones uncomfortable to use. I like using my phone in one hand, I like keeping it in my pants pocket all day. The larger phones got, the less I could use them like I wanted.

Then, they announced the 12 mini—not only a return to the classic design language, but back to the smaller size! Finally. I pre-ordered it on the day of the announcement, something I had never done before.

The weird thing about it was that this came along with Apple solidifying the iPhones into two sub lines—“regular” and “pro”, with some significant differences between the two around the camera and other features. Each subline got two phones, the standard model, and then the Pros got the frankly obnoxiously large Pro Max, and the non-Pro got the smaller mini. Other than the size the two sizes of each subline were identical—except for the size of the battery, which expanded or contracted to fit the volume available.

And this seemed to trip the whole thing up. There seemed to be a lot of pent-up demand for a smaller phone, but the reality wasn’t quite what anyone expected. I knew more than a few people that that wanted a smaller phone, but weren’t willing to give up the “good” camera. On top of that, the 12 mini had shockingly poor battery life compared to it’s immediate predecessors, and I think it was real easy to sigh and buy the bigger one.

In addition, and uncharacteristically for Apple, the marketing on the mini seemed almost non-existant; it seemed like the original release of the 12 mini flopped, and then they threw up their hands and grudgingly went through with the plans they already had for a 13 mini but no more.

And in a lot of ways, “Mini” was the tell. In Apple-speak, the small-but-good models end with “Air”. Mini was the term they used for the smaller, cheaper iPods; no one thought those were as good as the “regular” iPods, those were the ones you bought because you needed something cheap or needed something really, really small. Everyone I knew with an iPod mini had one as their “other” iPod, they one they jogged with, not the one they ran the party playlist with. But that doesn’t apply to iPhones, you don’t have your “other” iPhone you take jogging.

So, for the 14 models, they replaced the “other non-pro phone” with the 14 Plus, which was a 14 but a little bigger, a phone even less people wanted. Rumor has it that it’s not just the mini, but the all the non-pro phones that have lower-than-expected sales, with the 14 plus having even worse sales than the 13 mini. Apple likes their 2 or 3 year production cycles, it’ll be interesting to see what iPhones 17 look like. Personally, I think a Pro Mini would sell like gangbusters—that’s something you could sell as an iPhone Air, and charge extra for. But I don’t manage a major consumer electronics company.

Faced with the rumors that the mini form factor wasn’t long for this world, I upgraded to a 13 mini earlier this year, the first time I’ve ever done a year-over-year upgrade, and the first time I upgraded to “last year’s” model.

And that’s gonna be it for a while. It’s my absolute favorite size the phone has ever had, and I’ll upgrade to a bigger device over my dead body.

Here’s hoping they bring a small size back before the battery in this one quits working.

Ridiculous Fishing!

Holy smokes! Ridiculous Fishing is back in a new and updated form in Apple Arcade.

The original was a game my kids and I played constantly a decade ago. I still get the background music from the first zone stuck in my head from time to time.

One of the most irritating things about the Apple iOS app store ecosystem is the way apps will just rot, and as the platform moves forward apps that can’t or wont support regular updates will fall away and disappear. (To be clear, I understand why Apple requires developers to keep their apps up to date, I just disagree.. There’s no reason why an app from 2014 shouldn’t be able to run just fine on the same platform in 2023. Heck, with the increase in power of a modern iPhone’s processor, the OS and app store could provision an entire fully-sandboxed VM running the older version of iOS the games were designed for. But I digress.)

However, something Apple is very good at is announcing that they’ve fixed all the problems with a previous product or service, without ever actually admitting that the problems existed in the first place. In a lot of ways, Apple Arcade feels like an apology for how the app store treats games in the first place.

One of the fun things about the service is the number of primal app store games that have come back to life with a + version in Arcade—Osmos, Angry Birds, Stardew Valley, Ridiculous Fishing—it’s like someone looked at my iPad’s homescreen in 2013.

In any case, I’m glad it’s back.

Of course, its not just a “remaster”, but a full-remake, with new graphics, new game modes, more fish. Plus! The updated version replaces the original spoof social network “byrdr” with the even funner “Bik Bok”.

I’ve very much enjoyed re-exploring the old map, re-discovering the weird fishes, and having the same argument I had with my kid before about which guns are the best.

Apple Vision Pro: New Ways to be Alone

A man sits alone in an apartment. The apartment is small, and furnished with modern-looking inexpensive furniture. The furniture looks new, freshly installed. This man is far too old to be sitting in a small, freshly furnished apartment for any good or happy reason. Newly divorced? He puts on his Apple Vision Pro(tm) headset. He opens the photos app, and looks on as photos of his children fill the open space of an apartment no child has ever lived in. “Relive your happiest memories,” intones the cheerful narrator. The apartment is silent. It is one of the most quietly devastating short films I have ever seen. Apple Inc made this movie hoping it would convince you to buy their new headset. I am now hoping this man is only divorced, and not a widower. There is hope, because the fact that he has spent $3,500 on a headset strongly indicates he himself is the biggest tragedy in his own life.

The year is 2023. Apple would like to sell you a new way to be alone.

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And there is is, the Apple Vision Pro. The hardware looks incredible. The software looks miraculous. The product is very, very strange.

Back when I worked in the Space Glasses racket, I used to half-joke that space glasses designers should just own how big the thing has to be and make them look like cyberpunk 80s ski goggles. Apple certainly leaned into that—not Space Glasses, but Cyber Goggles.

Let’s start with the least intersting thing: the Price. “Does Tim Apple really expect me to pay 3,500 bucks for cyber goggles?” No, he literally doesn't. More so that any other Apple product in recent memory, this is a concept car.. The giveaway is the name, this is the Apple Vision Pro.. The goal is to try things out and build up anticipation, so that in three years when they release the Apple Vision Air for 1,800 bucks they’ll sell like hotcakes.

Apple being Apple, of course, figured out a way to sell their concept car at retail.

It’s status as a concept car goes a long way towards explaining many—but not all—of the very strange things about this product.

From a broad hardware/software features & functionality, this is close to what we were expecting. AR/Mixed Reality as the default operating mode, Apps and objects appearing as if they were part of the real-life environment, hand gesture control, a focus on experiences and enhanced productivity, with games getting only a passing glance.

Of course, there were several things I did find surprising.

First, I didn’t expect it to be a standalone unit, I was really expecting a “phone accessory” like the Watch (or arguably the Apple TV was to begin with.). But no, for all intents and purposes, there’s an entire laptop jammed into a pair of goggles. That’s a hell of an impressive feat of industrial engineering.

I was certainly not expecting the “external screen showing your eyes.” That got rumored, and I dismissed it out of hand, because that’s crazy. But okay, as implemented, now I can see what they were going for.

One of the biggest social problems with space glasses—or cyber goggles—is how you as the operator can communicate to other people that you’re paying attention to cyberspace as opposed to meat space. Phones, laptops, books all solve this the same way—you point your face at them and are clearly looking at the thing, instead of the people around you.

Having the screen hide your eyes while in cyberspace certainly communicates which mode the operator is in and solves the “starting a fight by accident” problem.

Using eye tracking as a key UI interaction shouldn’t have been surprising, but was. I spent that whole part of the keynote slapping my forehead; _of course! Of course that’s how that would work!

I expected games to get short shrift, but the lack of any sort of VR gaming attention at all really surprised me. Especially given that in the very same keynote they had actual real-life KOJIMA announcing that Death Stranding was coming to the Mac! Gaming is getting more attention at Apple than it’s gotten in years, and they just… didn’t talk about that with the headset?

Also strange was the lack of new “spacial” UIs? All the first party Apple software they showed was basically the same as on the Mac or iOS, just in a window floating in space. By comparison, when the Touch Bar launched, they went out of their way to show what every app they made used it for, from the useful (Final Cut’s scrub timeline, emoji pickers, predictive text options) to the mediocre (Safari’s tabs). Or Force Touch on the iPhone, for “right click” menus in iOS. Here? None of that. This is presumably a side effect of Apple’s internal secrecy and the schedule being such that they needed to announce it at the dev conference half a year before it shipped, but that’s strange. I was expecting at least a Final Cut Pro spacial interface that looks like an oldschool moviola, given they just ported FCP X to the iPad, and therefore presumably, the Vision.

Maybe the software group learned from all the time they poured into the Toubchbar & Force Touch. Or more likely, this was the first time most of the internal app dev groups got to see the new device, and are starting their UI designs now, to be ready for release with the device next year.

And so, if I may be so crude as to grade my own specific predictions:

1. Extremely aware of it's location in physical space, more so than just GPS, via both LIDAR and vision processing. Yes.
2. Able to project UI from phone apps onto a HUD. Nope! Turns out, it runs locally!
3. Able to download new apps by looking at a visual code. Unclear? Presumably this will work?
4. Hand tracking and handwriting recognition as a primary input paradigm. Yes, although I missed the eye tracking. And a much stronger emphasis on voice input than I expected, although it’s obvious in retrospect.
5. Spacial audio. Yes.
6. Able to render near-photoreal "things" onto a HUD blended with their environment. Heck yes.
7. Able to do real-time translation of languages, including sign language. Unclear at this time. Maybe?

But okay! Zooming out, they really did it—they built Tony Stark’s sunglasses. At least, as close as the bleeding edge of technology can get you here in 2023. It’s only going to get lighter and smaller from here on out.

And here’s the thing: this is clearly going to be successful. The median response from the people who got hands-on time last week has been very positive. It might not fly off the shelves, but it’ll do at least as well as the new Mac Pro, whose whole selling point is the highly advanced technology of “PCI slots”.

By the time the Apple Vision Air ships in 2027, they’ll have cut the weight and size of the goggles, and there’s going to be an ecosystem built up from developers figuring out how to build a Spacial UI for the community of early adopters.

I’m skeptical the Cyber Goggles form factor will replace the keyboard-screen laptop or iPhone as a daily driver, but this will probably end up with sales somewhere around the iPad Pro at the top of the B-tier, beloved by a significant but narrow user base.

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But all that’s not even remotely the most interesting thing. The most interesting thing is the story they told.

As usual, Apple showed a batch of filmed demos and ads demonstrating “real world” use, representing their best take on what the headset is for.

Apple’s sweet spot has always been “regular, creative people who have things to do that they’d like to make easier with a computer.” Not “computers for computer’s sake”—that’s *nix, not “big enterprise capital-W Work”—that’s Windows. But, regular folks, going about their day, their lives being improved by some piece of Apple kit.

And their ads & demos always lean in the aspirational nature of this. Attractive young people dancing to fun music from their iPods! Hanging out in cool coffee shops with their MacBooks! Creative pros working on fun projects in a modern office with colorful computers! Yes! That all looks fun! I want to be those people!

Reader, let me put my cards directly out on the table: I do not want to be any of the people in the Apple Vision demos.

First, what kind of work are these people doing? Other than watching movies, they’re doing—productivity software? Reviewing presentations, reading websites, light email, checking messages. Literally Excel spreadsheets. And meetings. Reviewing presentations in a meeting. Especially for Apple, this is a strangely “corporate” vision of the product.

But more importantly, where are they? Almost always, they’re alone.

Who do we see? A man, alone, looking at photos. A woman, alone in her apartment, watching a movie. Someone else, alone in a hotel room, reviewing a work presentation with people who are physically elsewhere. Another woman alone in a hotel room using FaceTime to talk to someone—her mother? “I miss you!” she says in one of the few audible pieces of dialog. A brief scene of someone playing an Apple Arcade game, alone in a dark room. A man in a open floor-plan office, reading webpages and reading email, turns the dial to hide his eyes from his coworkers. A woman on a flight pulls her headset on to tune out the other people om the plane.

Alone, alone, alone.

Almost no one is having fun. Almost no one is happy to be where they are. They’re doing Serious Work. Serious, meaning no one is creating anything, just reviewing and responding. Or consuming. Consuming, and wishing they were somewhere, anywhere, else.

It’s a sterile, corporate vision of computing, where we use computers to do, basically, what IBM would have imagined in the 1970s. A product designed _by_ and for upper middle management at large corporations. Work means presentation, spreadsheets, messages, light email.

Sterile, and with a grim undercurrent of “we know things are bad. We know you can’t afford an apartment big enough for the TV you want, or get her take you back, or have the job you wanted. But at least you can watch Avatar while pretending to be on top of a mountain.”

And with all these apps running on the space glasses, no custom UIs. Just, your existing apps floating in a spectral window, looking mostly the same.

Effectively, no games. There was a brief shot of someone playing something with a controller in a hovering window? But nothing that used the unique capabilities platform. No VR games. No Beat Saber, No Mans Sky, Superhot, Half-Life: Alyx. Even by Apple standards, this is a poor showing.

Never two headsets in the same place. Just one, either alone, or worn by someone trying to block out their surroundings.

The less said about the custom deepfake facetime golems, the better.

And, all this takes place in a parallel world untouched by the pandemic. We know this product was already well along before anyone had heard of COVID, and it’s clear the the last three years didn’t change much about what they wanted to build. This is a product for a world where “Remote Work” means working from a hotel on a trip to the customer. The absolute best use case for the product they showed was to enable Work From Home in apartments too small to have a dedicated office space, but Apple is making everyone come back to the office, and they can’t even acknowledge that use.

There are ways to be by yourself without being alone. They could have showed a DJ prepping their next set, a musician recording music, an artist building 3d models for a game. Instead, they chose presentations in hotels and photos dark, empty apartments.

---

I want to end the same way they ended the keynote, with that commercial. A dad with long hair is working while making his daughter toast. This is more like it! I am this Dad! I’ve done exactly this! With close to that hair!

And by the standards they’s already set, this is much better! He’s interacting with his kids while working. He’s working on his Surf Shop! By which we mean he’s editing a presentation to add some graphics that were sent to him.

But.

That edit couldn’t wait until you made your kid toast? It’s toast, it doesn’t take that long. And he’s not designing a surfboard, he’s not even building a presentation about surfboards, he’s just adding art someone sent him to a presentation that already exists.

His kid is staring at a screen with a picture of her dad’s eyes, not the real thing. And not to put too fine a point on it, but looking at his kid without space glasses in the way is the moment Darth Vader stopped being evil. Tony Stark took his glasses off when he talked to someone.

I can already do all that with my laptop. And when I have my laptop in the kitchen, when my daughter asks what I’m working on, I can just gesture to the screen and show her. I can share.

This is a fundamentally isolating view of computing, one where we retreat into unsharable private worlds, where our work email hovers menacingly over the kitchen island.

No one ever looks back and their life and thinks, “thank goodness I worked all those extra hours instead of spending time with my kids.” No one looks back and celebrates the times they made a presentation at the same time as lunch. No one looks back and smiles when they think of all the ways work has wormed into every moment, eroding our time with our families or friends, making sure we were never present, but always thinking about the next slide, the next tab, the next task..

No one will think , “thank goodness I spent three thousand five hundred dollars so I had a new way to be alone.”

Space Glasses

Wearable Technology, for your face

Once computers got small enough that “wearable technology” was a thing we could talk about with a straight face, glasses were an obvious form factor. Eye glasses were already the world’s oldest wearable technology! But glasses are tricky. For starters, they’re small. But also, they already work great at what they do, a nearly peerless piece of accessibility technology. They last for years, work on all kinds of faces, work in essentially any environment you can think of, and can seamlessly treat any number of conditions simultaneously. It’s not immediately obvious what value there is in adding electricity and computers. My glasses already work great, why should I need to charge them, exactly? Plus, if you need glasses you need them. I can drive home if my watch crashes, I can’t go anywhere if my glasses break.

There’s a bit in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which has sort of lost it’s context now, about how goofy digital watches were, considering they didn’t do anything that clockwork watches couldn’t do except “need new batteries.” Digital Glasses have that problem, but more so.

So instead smartphones happened, and then smart watches.

But still, any number of companies have tried to sell you a computer you strap to your head and over your eyes. Mostly, these exist on an axis between 3d headsets, a form factor that mostly froze somewhere around the VirtualBoy in the early 90s, and the Google Glass, which sounded amazing if you never saw or wore one. Now it looks like Apple is ”finally” going to lift the curtain on their version of a VR/AR glasses headset.

A couple of lifetimes ago, I worked with smart glasses. Specifically, I was on the team that shipped Level Smart Glasses, along with a bunch of much more interesting stuff that was never released. For a while, I was a major insurance company’s “Lead Engineer for Smart Glasses”. (“Hey, what can I tell ya? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Truthfully, I don’t think about those guys that much since all that stuff went down.”)

I spent a lot of time thinking about what a computer inside your glasses could do. The terminology slid around a lot. “Smart Glasses.” “Wearable Tech.” “Digital Eyewear.” “Smart Systems.” “VR headsets.” “Reality Goggles.”

I needed a name that encompassed the whole universe of head-mounted wearable computing devices. I called them Space Glasses. Internally at least, the name stuck.

Let me tell you about Space Glasses.

Let’s Recap

Traditionally the have been two approaches to a head-mounted computer.

First, you have the VR Headset. This broke out into the mainstream in the early 90s with products like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, but also all those “VR movies” (Johnny Mnemonic, Disclosure, Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity,) and a whole host of game initiatives lost to time. (Who else remembers System Shock had a VR mode? Or Magic Carpet?)

On the other hand, you have the Heads Up Display, which from a pop-culture perspective goes back to mid 80s movies like Terminator or Robocop, and maybe all the way back to Razor Molly in Neuromancer. These stayed fictional while the VR goggles thrashed around. And then Google Glass happened.

Google Glass was a fantastic pitch followed up by a genuinely terrible product. I was at CES a couple years back, and there’s an entire cottage industry of people trying to ship a product that matches the original marketing for Glass.

Glass managed to be the best and worst thing that could have happened to the the industry. It demonstrated that such a thing was possible, but did it in a way that massively repulsed most of the population.

My glass story goes like this: I was at a convention somewhere in the greater Silicon Valley area, probably the late lamented O’Reilly Velocity. I’m getting coffee before the keynote. It’s the usual scrum of folks milling around a convention center lobby, up too early, making small talk with strangers. And there’s the guy. Very valley software engineer type, pasty, button down shirt. Bit big, a real husky guy. And he’s staring at me. Right at me, eyes drilling in. He’s got this look. This look.. I have no idea who he is, I look up, make eye contact. He keeps starting with that expression. And for a split second, I think, “Well, huh, I guess I’m about to get into a fistfight at a convention.” Because everything about this guy’s expression says he’s about to take a swing. Then he reaches up and taps his google glasses. And I realize that he had no idea I was there, he was reading email. And thats when I knew that product was doomed. Because pulling out your phone and starting at it serves an incredibly valuable social indicator that you’re using a device.. With a seamless heads-up display like glass, there was no way to communicate when you were reading twitter as opposed to starting down a stranger.

Which is a big part of why everyone wearing them became glassholes.

Plus, you looked like a massive, unredeemable dork. To mis-quote a former boss of mine, no produc tis going to work if it’ll make it harder for you to get laid, and Glass was the most effective form of birth control known to lifekind.

Underreported between the nuclear-level dorkiness and the massive privacy concerns was the fact that Glass was incredibly uncomfortable to wear for more than a couple of minutes at a time.

Despite that, the original Glass pitch is compelling, and there’s clearly a desire to find an incarnation of the idea that doesn’t set off the social immune system.

Glass and Better-made VirtualBoy’s aren’t the only ways to go, though.

Spectrums of Possibilities

There are a lot of ways to mount a microprocessor to someone’s head. I thought of all the existing space glasses form factors operating on two main orthogonal axes, or spectrums. I’ll spare you the 2x2 consultant chart, and just describe them:

• With a screen, or without. There are plenty of other sensors or ways to share information with the wearer, but “does it have a screen or heads-up-display” is a key differentiator.
• All Day wear vs Single Task wear. Do you wear them all the time, like prescription spectacles, or do you put them on for a specific time and reason, like sunglasses?

There are also two lesser dimensions I mention for completeness:

• Headset-style design vs “normal” glasses design. This is more a factor of the current state of miniaturization than a real design choice. Big headsets are big only because they can’t fit all that in a package that looks like a Ray-bans wayfarer. Yet. You can bet the second that the PS VR can look like the Blues Brother’s sunglasses, they will.
• VR vs AR. If you have a screen, does the picture replace the real world completely, or merge with it? While this is a pretty major difference now—think VR headset vs Google glass—like the above this is clearly a quirk of an immature technology. It wont take long before any mature product can do both, and swap between them seamlessly.

What do we use them for, though?

This is all well and good, but what are the use cases, really?

On the “no screen” side of the house: not much. Those are, fundamentally, regular “dumb” non-electric glasses. Head mounted sensors are intersting, but not interesting enough to remember to charge another device on their own. People did some interesting things using sound instead of vision (Bose, for example,) but ultimately, the correct form factor for an audio augmented reality device are AirPods.

Head-mounted sensors, on their own, are interesting. You get very different, and much cleaner, data than from a watch or a phone in a pocket, mostly because you have a couple million years of biological stabilization working for you, instead of against you. Plus, they’re open to the air, they have the same “sight-lines” as the operator, and they have direct skin contact.

But not interesting enough to get someone to plug their glasses in every night.

With a screen, then, or some kind of heads-up display.

For all-day wear, it’s hard to imagine something compelling enough to be successful. Folks who need prescriptions have already hired their glasses to do something very specific, and folks who don’t need corrective eyewear will, rounding to the nearest significant digit, never wear spectacles all day if they don’t need to.

Some kind of head’s up display is, again, sort of interesting, but does anyone really want their number of unread emails hovering in their peripheral vision at all times?

I saw a very cool demo once where the goggles used the video camera, some face recognition technology, and a database to essentially overlay people’s business cards—their name & title—under their faces. “Great for people who can’t remember names!” And, like, that’s a cool demo, and great you could pull that off, but buddy, I think you might be mistaking your own social anxiety for a product market just a little bit. And man, if you think you’re awkward at social events when you can’t remember someone’s name, I hate to break it to you, but reading their name off your cyber goggles is not going to help things.

For task-based wear, the obvious use remains games. Games, and game-like “experiences”, see what this couch looks like in your own living room, and the like. There’s some interesting cases around 3d design, being able to interact with an object under design as if it was really there.

So, essentially, we’ve landed on VR goggles, which have been sputtering right on the edge of success for close to 30 years now, assuming we only start counting with the Virtual Boy.

There’s currently at least three flavors of game-focused headwear—Meta’s Quest (the artist formerly known as the Oculus,) Sony’s Playstation VR, and Valve’s index. Nearby, you have things like Microsoft’s HoloLens and MagicLeap which are the same thing but “For Business”, and another host of similar devices I can’t think of. (Google Cardboard! Nintendo Labo VR!)

But, fundamentally, these are all the same—strap some screens directly to your eyes and complete a task.

And, that’s a pretty decent model! VR googles are fun, certainly in short bursts. Superhot VR is a great game!

Let’s briefly recap the still-unsolved challenges.

First, they’re all heavy, uncomfortable, and expensive. These are the sort of problems that Moore’s Law and Efficiency of Scale will solve assuming people keep pouring money in, so can largely write those off.

Second, you look like a dork when you wear these. In addition to having half a robot face, reacting to things no one else can see looks deeply, deeply silly. There is no less-attractive person than a person playing a VR game.

Which brings us to the third, and hardest problem: VR goggles as they exist today are fundamentally isolating.

An insufficiently acknowledged truth is that at their core, computers and their derivatives are fundamentally social devices. Despite the pop-culture archetype of the lone hacker, people are constantly waving people over to look at what’s on their screen, passing their phone around, trading the controller back and forth. Consoles games might be “single player,” but they’re rarely played by one person.

VR goggles deeply break this. You can’t drop in and look over someone’s shoulder when they have the headwear, easily pass the controller back and forth, have a casual game night.

Four friends on a couch playing split screen Mario Kart is a very, very different game than four friends each with a headset strapped over their eyes.

Not an unsolvable set of problems, but space glasses that don’t solve for these will never break out past a niche market.

AR helps this a lot. The most compelling use for AR to date is still Pokemon Go, using the phone’s camera to show Pokemon out in the real world. Pokemon Go was a deeply social activity when it was a its peak, nearly sidestepping all the isolating qualities AV/VR tends to have.

Where do they fit?

At this point, it’s probably worth stepping back and looking at a slightly bigger picture. What role do space glasses fill, or fill better that the other computing technology we have?

Everyone likes to compare the introduction of new products to the the smartphone, but that isn’t a terribly useful comparison; the big breakthrough there was to realize that it was possible to demote “making phone calls” to an app instead of a whole device, and then make a computer with that app on it small enough to hold in your hand.

The watch is a better example. Wristwatches are, fundamentally, information radiators. Classic clockwork based watches radiated a small set of information all the time. The breakthrough was to take that idea and run with it, and use the smart part of smart watches to radiate more and different kinds of information. Then, as a bonus, pack some extra human-facing sensors in there. Largely, anything that tried to expand the watch past an information radiator has not gone so well, but adding new kinds of information has.

What about glasses then? Regular eye glasses, help you see things you couldn’t otherwise see. In the case of prescription glasses, they bring things into focus. Sunglasses help you see things in other environments. Successful smart glasses will take this and run with it, adding more and different things you can see.

Grasping towards Conclusions

Which all (conveniently) leads us to what I think is the best theoretical model for space glasses—Tony Stark’s sunglasses.

They essentially solve for all of the above problems. They look good—ostentatious but not unattractive. It’s obvious when he’s using them. While on, they offer the wearer an unobstructed view of the world with a detailed display overlayed. Voice controlled.

And, most critically, they’re presented as an interface to a “larger” computer somewhere else—in the cloud, or back at HQ. They’re a terminal. They don’t replace the computer, they replace the monitor.

And that’s where we sit today. Some expensive game hardware, and a bunch of other startups and prototypes. What’s next?

Space Glasses, Apple Style

What, then, about Apple?

From the rumor mill, it seems clear that they had multiple form factors in play over the course of their headset project, they seem to have settled on the larger VR goggles/headset style that most everyone else has also landed on.

It also seems clear that this has been in the works for a while, with various hints and seemingly imminent announcements. Personally, I was convinced that this was going to be announced in 2020, and there was a bunch of talks at WWDC that year that seemed to have an empty space where “and you can do this on the goggles!” was supposed to go.

And of course that tracks with the rumor that that Apple was all in on a VR-headset, which then got shot by Jonny Ive and they pivoted to AR. Which jives with the fact that Apple made a big developer play into AR/VR back in 2017, and then just kinda... let it sit. And now Ive is out and they seem to be back to a headset?

What will they be able to do?

Famously, Apple also never tells people what's coming... but they do often send signals out to the developer community so they can get ready ahead of time. (The definitive example was the year they rolled out the ability for iOS apps to support multiple screen sizes 6 months before they shipped a second size of phone.)

So. Some signals from over the last couple of years that seem to be hinting at what their space glasses can do. (In the parlance of our times, it's time for some Apple glasses kremlinology game theory!)

ArKit's location detection. AR Kit can now use a combination of the camera, apple maps data, and the iPad's LIDAR to get a crazy accurate physical location in real space. There's no reason to get hyper-accurate device location for an iPad. But for a head-mounted display, with a HUD...?

Not to mention some very accurate people Occlusion & Detection in AR video.

RealityKit, meanwhile, has some insane AR composition tools, which also leverage the LIDAR camera from the iPad, and can render essentially photo-real objects ito the "real world”.

Meanwhile, some really interesting features on the AirPods, like spatial audio in AirPods Pro. Spacial has been out for a while now, and seems like the sort of thing you try once and then gorfet about? A cool demo. But, it seems like a way better idea if when you turn your head, you can also see what’s making the sounds?

Opening up the AirPods API: "AirPods Pro Motion API provides developers with access to orientation, user acceleration, and rotational rates for AirPods Pro — ideal for fitness apps, games, and more." Did anyone make apps for AirPods? But as a basic API for head-tracking?

Widgets! A few versions back, Apple rolled a way to do Konfabulator-esque (or, if you rather, Android-style) widgets for the iOS home screen. There's some strong indications that these came out of the Apple watch team (codenamed chrono, built around SwiftUI,) and may have been intended as a framework for custom watch faces. But! A lightweight way to take a slice of an app and "project" a minimal UI as part of a larger screen? That's perfect for a glasses-based HUD. I can easily see allowing iOS widgets to run on the glasses with no extra modifications on top of what the develoer had to do to get them running on the home screen. Day 1 of the product and you have a whole app store full of ready-to-go HUD components.

App Clips! On the one hand, it's "QR codes, but by Apple!" On the other hand, what we have here is a way to load up an entire app experience by just looking at a picture. Seems invaluable for a HUD+camera form factor? Especially a headset with a strong AR component—looking at elements in AR space download new features?

Hand and pose tracking. Part of greater ML/Vision frameworks, they rolled out crazy-accurate hand tracking, using their on-device ML. Check out the demo at 6:40 in this developer talk

Which is pretty cool on it's own except they ALSO rolled out:

Handwriting detection. Scribble is the new-and-improved iPad+pencil handwriting detector, and there's some room for a whole bunch of Newton jokes here. But mixed with the hand tracking? That's a terribly compelling interaction paradigm for a HUD-based device. Just write in the air in front of you, the space glasses turn that into text on the fly.

And related, iOS 14 added ML detection and real time translation of sign language. (?!)

Finally, there's a strong case to be made that the visual overhaul they gave MacOS 11 and iOS14 is about making it more "AR-friendly”, which would be right about the last time the goggles were rumored to be close to shipping.

In short, this points to a device:

1. Extremely aware of it's location in physical space, more so than just GPS, via both LIDAR and vision processing.
2. Able to project UI from phone apps onto a HUD.
3. Able to download new apps by looking at a visual code.
4. Hand tracking and handwriting recognition as a primary input paradigm.
5. Spacial audio.
6. Able to render near-photoreal "things" onto a HUD blended with their environment.
7. Able to do real-time translation of languages, including sign language.

From a developer story, this seems likely to operate like the watch was at first. Tethered to a phone, which drives most of the processing power and projects the UI elements on to the glasses screen.

What are they For?

What they can do is all well and good, but what’s the pitch? Those are all features, or parts of features. Speeds and Feeds, which isn’t Apple’s style.What will Apple say they’re for?

The Modern-era (Post-Next) Apple doesn’t ship anything without a story. Which is good, more companies should spend the effort to build a story about why you need this, what this new thing is for, how it fits into your life. What problems you have this solves.

The iPod was “carry all your music with you all the time”.

The iPhone was the classic “three devices” in one.

The iPod Touch struggled with “the iPhone, but without a phone!”, but landed on “the thing you buy your kids to play games before you’re willing to buy them their own phone.”

The iPad was “your phone, but bigger!”

The Watch halfheartedly tried to sell itself as an enhanced communication device (remember the heartbeat thing?) before realizing it was a fitness device.

AirPods were “how great would it be if your earbuds didn’t have wires? Also, check out this background noise reduction.”

The HomePod is “a speaker you can yell requests at.”

So, what’s will the Space Glasses be?

For anyone else, the obvious play would be games, but games just aren’t a thing Apple is willing to be good at. There’s pretty much a straight line from letting Halo, made by Mac developers, become a huge hit as an XBOX exclusive to this story from Panic’s Cabel Sasser about why Untitled Goose Game is on every platform except the Mac App Store.

This is not unlike their failures to get their pro audio/video apps out into the Hollywood ecosystem. Both require a level of coöperation with other companies that Apple has never been willing to do.

Presumably, they’ll announce some VR games to go on the Apple Glasses. The No Mans Sky team is strongly hinting they’ll be there, so, okay? That’s a great game, but a popular VR-compatible game from six years ago is table stakes. Everyone else already has that. What’s new?

They’ve never treated games as a primary feature of a new platform. Games are always a “oh yeah, them too” feature.

What, then?

I suspect they’ll center around “Experiences”. VR/AR environments. Attend a live concert like you’re really there! Music is the one media type Apple is really, really good at, so I expect them to lean heavily into that. VR combined with AirPods-style spacial audio could be compelling? (This would be easier to believe if they were announcing the goggles at their music event in September instead of WWDC.)

Presumably this will have a heavily social component as well—attend concerts with your family from out of town. Hang out in cyberspace! Explore the Pyramids with your friends!

There’s probably also going to be a remote-but-together shared workspace thing. Do your zoom meetings in VR instead of starting at the Brady Bunch credits on your laptop.

There’s probably also going to be a whole “exciting new worlds of productivity” where basic desktop use gets translated to VR/AR. Application windows floating in air around your monitor! Model 3d objects with your hands over your desk!

Like the touch bar before it, what’s really going to be interesting here is what 1st party apps gets headset support on day one. What’s the big demo from the built-in apps? Presumably, Final Cut gets a way to edit 360 video in 360, but what else? Can I spread my desktop throughout the volume of my office? Can I write an email by waving my hands in empty space?

Anyway.

The whole time I was being paid to think about Space Glasses, Apple was the Big Wave. The Oncoming Storm. We knew they were going to release something, and if anyone could make it work, it would be them. I spent hours on hours trying to guess what they would do, so we could either get out ahead or get out of the way.

I’m so looking forward to finding out what they were really building all that time.

Happy Trails, Dark Sky

Dark Sky has been my default go-to weather app on my phone for just about a decade now.  I loved it.

The genius behind it was the realization that weather forecasting is actually very accurate as long as you don’t go too far into the future or cover too large an area.  “What’s the temperature going to be next week?” is a hard question and the answer is going to be wrong.  “Will it rain at my house in the next hour?” is still a hard question, but you can get the answer dead on.

Dark Sky started as pretty much just answering “do I need to take a rain jacket with me?”.  When it worked, it was like sorcery, frequently correctly predicting the time rain would start down to the minute.

They branched out into longer term “traditional” forecasts first as a separate web app at forecast.io, and then folded that into the main Dark Sky App. They also has a spectacular API for getting weather data that I used on a project a couple lifetimes ago.

But, as these things go, Apple bought them out back in 2020, rolled the fundamental functionality into the new-for-iOS 16 weather app, and then today turned off the backend for the Dark Sky App itself.

So, okay.  I know nothing about the financial or personal situations of anyone at Dark Sky, but I have no doubts of any kind that accepting a buy out from Apple in the dark days of mid-2020 was the right call.  And separate from the back end tech, the new iOS 16 weather app was a triumphant story for other reasons.  Happy endings all around!

But.

The new weather app is fine, its FINE, but it’s very Apple-built-in-app-y.  The Dark Sky app hd this fantastic unique design.  Cool layout, distinctive symbols, subtle animations, a holdover from the days when iOS apps had a little more zip to them than they do now.  I’ll miss it.

And, you know, there’s something sad any time a small company that makes one really nicely made valuable thing that people love decide that the right thing to do is take the buy out.  I’m sure I’d make the same call in their place, and it’s easy to over-signify one company deciding to cash out, but— I’m still going to miss that app I used every day.,